Another Brick in the Wall
by arianedartagnan
Summary: One spring day in 1999, five mage friends find themselves in a dingy little bar in San Francisco. Surprised by Technocratic agents, vehemently insisting that they are Not the Cavalry thank you very much, they nevertheless embark on a journey to rescue a group of mage children and defeat the Technocracy's latest plot.
1. Chapter 1 Lin's Books

Chapter 1: Lin's Books

My favorite time of the day was 10 p.m., after we'd finished straightening the bookstore and Dad had taken the cash to the bank, and Colette and I had done the dishes and walked Brownie. (PJ used to join us, getting even more excited than the dog over stray clumps of weeds and odd refuse on the sidewalk, but we resolutely did not discuss that.) All the chores completed, the parental elements would retire upstairs to their bedroom in silence, as they had been wont to do this past year. Colette would sometimes stay downstairs in the bookstore to arrange a few last displays just so or to wipe off a patch of dust that I'd missed and give me a disapproving look, which I always ignored. (Disapproving looks were an older sister's prerogative, and I would not permit the usurpation of my birthright.) As likely as not, she'd then run around calling for Cookie until she found the poor cat and extracted her from under the counter or behind a bookcase and bore the squirming mass of fur off to her bedroom. Then I'd finally be alone in Lin's Books, left to brood in peace among the shelves and the tables laden with books.

When Mom and Dad immigrated to California thirty years ago, they sought the most bland, ordinary life possible. Back then, the Technocracy hadn't built up a strong presence in the Bay Area yet, so it seemed a relatively safe home for a young mage couple. Besides, what could have been more inconspicuous than settling down among all the other immigrants? Opening a restaurant or laundry store would have been too clichéd – and possibly attract attention _because_ of the cliché – so they settled on a bookstore. And anyway, you wouldn't expect any Technocrat to look too closely at a bookstore. Paper and ink bound into volumes using centuries-old technology? How quaint. Even so, after my parents' close call in Taipei, they weren't taking any chances. From the start, they carefully warded and even built a sanctum in the little house they bought on a quiet street just off Cal Ave. We lived on the second floor, for the most part; the living room and den on the first floor became the core of Lin's Books. By the time I was ten and Colette five (PJ wouldn't be born for years), the bookstore was doing well enough for us to buy the house next door when our elderly neighbors moved to Arizona to be closer to their daughter. With permission from the City of Palo Alto, we knocked down the fence between the properties and converted both floors of the second house into an extension of Lin's Books. (Discreet Correspondence wards in each room ensured better security than most bookstores could afford.)

Later, my friend Cyndi Willis (now called Cyndi Aquilanti because she was a paranoid hacker type) found mention online of an outdoor bookstore in SoCal and showed me photos – a maze of freestanding shelves between two old houses; indoor spaces, including kitchens and hallways, all converted into rooms for showcasing books; brightly-colored awnings shading the outdoor bookcases and inviting tables and benches. The concept was quite intriguing. By this time, life as a mage had become increasingly dangerous as Technocracy consolidated its hold over the Bay Area, and the mage community of my childhood had fractured, first into tiny cells, then into isolated individuals. We'd always sheltered fugitives in our sanctum, but now their numbers swelled and we began to hear terrifying rumors of HIT marks, wild animals driven mad by horrible experiments and cybernetic implants, that were created for the express purpose of hunting down mages. This seemed like as good a time as any to strengthen the sanctum, and as a cover for the activity, we turned our outdoor space into a used books section.

Tonight I was just curling up with a book in my favorite armchair in the deserted store when Colette wandered back downstairs and threw herself into an armchair across the room. She sat up again immediately and glanced at the nearest shelf, at the gap where I'd removed a collection of Millay's poems.

She looked pointedly at the book in my hands. " _Jiejie_ , you know Mom hates it when you read the new books."

I shrugged. What was the point of owning a bookstore if you couldn't read the books in it? As long as I didn't crease the binding or wrinkle any pages, I couldn't see the harm. I didn't say any of this, though. Mom and I had been through it already. Countless times. Loudly. Colette and Dad (and possibly some of the neighbors) had heard it all. Besides, warning me not to damage the source of our livelihood wasn't why Colette was down here in her purple-and-white polka-dotted pajamas.

Waiting, I turned to a poem at random, idly skimmed the lines of "Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies."

A long sigh. Colette probably thought I was being difficult. "Have you seen Sam lately?"

Ah, that again. It was an endless source of amusement – to me, if not to Mom and Dad – that good-girl Colette had somehow developed a massive crush on one of our most questionable patrons, Sam, who was not only eleven years older but also a paranoid drug addict who was always ranting about how the Technocracy was out to get him. Admittedly, given that his mentor had vanished about a year ago, he probably had a point, but he might be more convincing if he weren't constantly high, or twitchy because he wasn't high, or reaching for his flask of whiskey. Or if he weren't shadowed by a highly conspicuous golem that grimly disapproved of his drug abuse. After a stern lecture from Mom one time, he'd _mostly_ stopped drinking in the philosophy section of our store, but I'd have been willing to bet that he still snuck sips when he thought no one was watching. (None of us ever warned him about the Correspondence wards, although if he were sober more often he might have detected them himself. He wasn't an _incompetent_ mage, after all.)

"Nope," I replied to Colette. "I haven't seen him since last Wednesday. Remember? He always says that – "

"You can't be too predictable, because that's how they _get_ you," Colette finished, mimicking Sam's shifty stance, trembling hands, and darting glances, as if expecting a squad of Technocrats to burst in at any minute to drag him off for re-conditioning.

Sam was a good guy under all the drugs and alcohol and poor personal hygiene, but I still couldn't understand what Colette saw in him. Maybe she just needed a distraction from PJ's disappearance, I thought. Maybe she found his hatred for the Technocracy reassuring, when the two of us were so convinced it was responsible but could only speculate because Mom and Dad refused to talk about any of the events of a year ago. (Which I thought was selfish and unfair and cruel, but short of finding a Mind mage, we didn't have any way to drag out information.) Since I was in a reasonably good mood at the moment, I added sympathetically, "I'm sure he'll be back soon. He asked us to order that translation of the Confucius _Analects_ , and – "

"Oh yeah! I remember!" Colette brightened up. She was, after all, the one who had recommended that particular translation to him, which she was reading for her philosophy class at Stanford. (I had my suspicions as to why she'd suddenly developed an interest in the field, and I was sure Mom and Dad did too, but none of us were saying anything.) "So he'll have to come back soon!" Her face cheerful again, she trotted back upstairs, leaving me alone with what peace could be found in poetry.

Any tranquility I felt had rapidly vanished by the next afternoon. Mom was in one of her foul moods because a shipment of novels arrived with all the upper right-hand corners crumpled, and a small child left unattended by a young mother had seized books on the bottom shelves and begun gnawing on them. Even after calling the publisher to complain about their packaging (or lack thereof) and expelling the mother and small child, Mom was still furious. Colette being safely in class, I was the nearest scapegoat.

Unfortunately, we had a lot of old arguments to continue. She picked my least favorite.

"You're twenty-seven years old! When are you going to settle down and start a family? Didn't you _hear_ Auntie Chen's story about her cousin's son's wife, who waited until she was thirty-five to try to have a baby because she was 'too busy with work'?" (As far as I remembered, said wife was a highly successful, i.e. well-paid, employee at some Wall Street firm, so her investment of child-bearing years into her career seemed justified.) "They couldn't have a baby for _four years_! They almost gave up! And then they finally had a son and he has autism! She'll have to quit her job to take care of him," Mom predicted righteously.

Having learned the painful way that it was best to let her rage, I stayed silent, drifted around the store, straightened a display of inspirational journals, and prayed fervently to all my ancestors for a customer to enter and interrupt the storm.

"Did you know that there's a new technology where you can – " Mom paused long enough to snatch a copy of the _World Journal_ off a newsstand and brandish it at me, "'freeze' your eggs? Maybe you should do this. See, it says here – "

This was going too far. What did she think I was, some sort of lab rat for new technologies? "Mom, I'm not refrigerating my eggs."

"Freezing! Freezing! _Aiyah_ , you never listen to anything I say. What did I do wrong? How did I raise such a rebellious daughter? Do I owe you something from a past life?"

"Mom – "

She wasn't even listening anymore. "Thirty years your father and I have worked hard to give you kids everything you wanted. We sent you girls to Stanford, and for what use? All those rich, promising boys there, and you come out without a boyfriend and your _meimei_ only wants that good-for-nothing drug addict!"

"Don't call him that! He's my friend!"

The lament only changed directions. "Ah, see? You've fallen under his bad influence too. I don't approve of your friends. Not a normal one among them – "

"Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you sent me to volunteer at St. Anthony's!" I couldn't resist taunting her. "It serves homeless people. What sort of friends did you think I'd make there?" It was even sort of true – St. Anthony's was where I'd met Sam, who volunteered there on his good days; Zig, who was indeed homeless and hence a Victim of an Uncaring Society, but who also dealt drugs for a living; and Ezri, who came from a Good Family but Went Wild after his mother disappeared (according to Mom) and developed an unwholesome interest in psychedelic mushrooms. She knew because Ezri had begun driving down to our bookstore to research fungi and cultures. He'd also been tending a cluster of intellectual mushrooms that devoured the old books in our dumpster, but I didn't think Mom needed to know that. Magical mushrooms growing right by our mundane little bookstore? She'd panic, change our names, and drag us off to Europe or something.

"I should never have listened to your Auntie Wu and let you go up there to volunteer!" Mom raged. " _She_ said it would get you into a top university for sure, but what good is a fancy education if you have no morals!"

"They're good people, Mom," I tried to say.

"How can you say they're good people? How can you stand there defending them? Who are you? Do I even know you anymore?"

Finally I lost my temper. "I don't know! Maybe you never did! If you did, you'd _listen_ to me about what I think and what I want! Maybe you'd _tell_ me why PJ had to go away and where that man took him! Why aren't we looking for him? Don't you even miss him?"

It was the cruelest thing I could have said, and I knew it even as I spoke but was well past caring.

"Get out! Get out of my house!" she roared.

"I was going anyway!" I yelled back. I grabbed my purse from behind the register and ran out the bookstore's front door, slamming it behind me and hearing the door chimes clang discordantly.

Still fuming, I stomped down the street and turned onto Cal Ave, walking past the shops and restaurants blindly until I came to the Caltrain station at the far end. A sloping ramp led down to a tunnel under the tracks. I clomped down it, planning to wander through the residential neighborhood on the far side until Mom and I both calmed down enough for me to go home. As I surfaced on the far side, though, the northbound train screeched to a halt at the station and began coughing out stray passengers. Suddenly I remembered that I was running low on ginseng, which formed a base for practically all the herbal concoctions that were my focus for Life magic, and goji berries, which I used to fix my vision when my contacts grew unbearable. Since I was on the right side of the tracks to head up to San Francisco anyway, I might as well pay a visit to Old Hsiao and his wife, an elderly Cantonese couple who ran my favorite traditional Chinese medicine shop in Chinatown. And, a niggling thought came at the back of my mind, I might buy something as a peace offering for Mom too. I hadn't _meant_ to say what I did about PJ at the end and she'd know that too and forgive me (eventually), but some wounds never heal….

The train was about to leave. I didn't have time to buy a ticket, so I just hurried up the steps into the nearest car and made my way to the back of the train, hoping the conductor wouldn't pick today to check tickets. As one might expect for 1:30 p.m. on a Friday, I got an entire half-car to myself and claimed a window seat, tossing my purse beside me and pulling out a pair of small, sharp scissors and a square of thin, scarlet paper about the size of my hand. Folding it in half, then in half again, then diagonally, I glanced around the car as if idly taking in the rows of dubiously clean seats, an elderly couple bickering in Cantonese at the far end, the dark thin carpeting, and the windows smudged by children's greasy foreheads. Everything _looked_ normal. While I turned to gaze out the window at the accelerating suburb, my hands busied themselves with paper and scissors – a cut here, little snips there. Fragments of red paper fell into my lap as I Prime-scanned my surroundings for any magical Effects. Finally, I unfolded a lacy eight-petaled flower, the unveiling of the artwork completing my Effect. Nothing unusual that I could detect, no Technocracy traps, no trackers. I was still safe. Good.

To pass the time while we rumbled northward, I refolded my flower and, entirely mundanely, set about embellishing the petals with delicate slashes and cut-out crescent moons. Two stops later, a harried mother boarded and tugged a young child past my seat; the child slowed to stare in awe at the flower blooming between my fingers, and I handed it to her with a smile. Wide eyed, she took it and stumbled after her mother, who hadn't noticed a thing save, perhaps, that she might be able to get an entire car to herself if she kept going. Just before they vanished through the doors leading to the next car, the little girl, who looked about seven or eight years old, turned back to offer me a shy smile.

A sweet, innocent, child's smile – just like PJ's.

In the act of returning the gesture, my face froze, and the child's expression turned fearful as she passed through the doors. Swallowing, leaning back in my seat, I pulled out another square of paper and fiddled with it restlessly.

PJ was my little brother, only eight years old, young enough, in fact, to be my or even Colette's son. It would have been so easy to resent him and all the patriarchal biases in Asian society of which he was the culmination. Cut off permanently from our extended family in Taiwan, as much for their safety as ours, knowing that Dad had no brothers and that his parents fervently hoped for a grandson bearing the Lin surname, Mom and Dad tried again and again for a son. Before my parents left Taipei, my grandfather had given Dad an old silver pocket watch that had been passed down in the family for generations – family, in this case, restricted to male Lin descendants. The watch could not pass to Colette or me or our children. Ping-Jen, more often known as PJ or, in sillier moments, PB&J, was a sort of late-life miracle brought about (I always suspected) by complicated Life rituals about which I knew nothing and wished to know nothing.

How could I not resent him, the hideous red-faced, scrunch-looking, screeching infant?

Yet how I could resent him, the sweet, mischievous little boy who got into scraps without ever quite seeming to understand _how_ he did it and without ever meaning to wreak so much havoc? He followed me around the bookstore so religiously that we began to call him my little disciple, and he once informed a date of mine with all solemnity that the guy had to buy me a frappucino. (The date did indeed buy me one, but it still wasn't enough to tempt me on a second outing.)

Then, suddenly, last January, he was gone.

Late one night, Mom and Dad woke all three of us and quietly herded us through the storage closet on the first floor into our sanctum. Mom and Dad were dressed in street clothes, and so was PJ, I noticed blearily.

"What's going on?" Colette yawned. "I have a chem midterm tomorrow at 9." She yawned again, and so did I. Watching us, clutching his stuffed elephant, PJ giggled and deliberately yawned too.

Unusually, neither Mom nor Dad grinned at their children's silliness or joined in. Instead, they gazed at us with such intensity that it was as if they'd use a Life Effect to wake us.

"Mommy," PJ wavered, running to hug her legs, "are you crying?" His own eyes threatened to mirror hers. She didn't reply, only swept him up into a tight, tight hug. "Mommy?" PJ began to cry too.

Confused, fully awake, Colette and I turned to Dad. "What's going on?" Colette repeated, sharply now.

Dad, who never gets emotional, actually had tears in his eyes too as he explained, " _Didi_ has to go away for a while."

"Go away?" we exclaimed. "Go away where? Why? How long?"

"We're not sure," Dad mumbled.

"What do you mean?" I asked frantically. "What's going on?"

PJ began to cry harder.

"That's enough!" Mom suddenly shouted. "It's for his safety. Don't ask any more questions."

Just then, the clock chimed midnight and right on the first ring (did he have Time magic or something?) a tall man swept into the room, long black cloak swirling melodramatically. None of us kids had ever seen him before, and I'd thought I knew all of our mage contacts.

He and my parents nodded gravely to one another but didn't greet one another by name. Curious, I thought, and traded a quick glance with Colette, who was staring fiercely at the stranger as if memorizing every last detail about him.

"It is time," he said gravely, gently. Maybe Colette could remember his face afterwards, but to me all visual impressions from that night were a blur. Weathered flesh, black fabric, the way the cloak caught the light when he reached for PJ.

The way the light reflected off the tears on PJ's cheeks as he clung to Mom.

The sound of both their sobbing.

The compassion in the man's voice as he said, oddly formally, "We will take good care of him. I'll return before the full moon to confirm my mission's success."

My mission's success? The wording caught my attention, but my mind was working too slowly, drowning in honey or molasses or some horrible thick sticky liquid….

Try as I might, I could never remember what my parting words to PJ were, or what he said to me.

That was fourteen months ago, and the man never returned.

The first few weeks were terrible, as we jumped every time the door chimes rang or footsteps thumped up the front steps. Mom cried a lot, and Dad blundered around the house, dazedly bumping into furniture, and both of them categorically refused to discuss it, _ever_. Even worse, we discovered that beginning a week after PJ left, no one outside the family seemed to remember him. It was as if he'd simply been erased from the world. Colette and I interrogated bookstore regulars, neighbors, teachers at the elementary school all three of us had attended, and his classmates with increasing disbelief and panic. None of them recognized the name; all of them looked at us as if we were mounting an incredibly puerile prank or just going crazy. They brought out old yearbooks to prove that no such person existed, and indeed, every photo ever taken of him had vanished. Gone from the family album were his baby pictures and all the photos through the years showing him chewing on a telephone (my favorite – I'd taken that one instead of rescuing the phone, to Mom's annoyance), blowing out candles on successive birthday cakes, standing proudly beside his first bike, squeezing Brownie or chasing Cookie. The album didn't even have blank spaces where I distinctly remembered the photos – instead, pictures proceeded in the usual chaotic fashion of family albums, but a family of mother, father, and two daughters. Even in group photos his image had disappeared, and in such a way that it didn't even look as if anyone were missing. How could this be?

In secret discussions after Mom and Dad had retired for the night, Colette and I hypothesized that a powerful Mind Effect was affecting everyone, but perhaps mages could resist it a little better. All the people we'd questioned so far were sleepers. With some trepidation, I texted Cyndi, who, to our great relief, _did_ remember that we had a brother named PJ and had been wondering why I hadn't mentioned him in a while. After hearing the story, she promised to investigate using her Correspondence-augmented super-hacker skills, but months passed and then a year, and she still couldn't find him. The man still didn't return, and Brownie stopped scratching at the door and whining sadly every afternoon when PJ should have come home from school. After an indignant complaint from a customer who thought the prank was going too far and maybe we were acting out from subconscious reasons and needed therapy, Mom and Dad sternly forbade Colette and me from discussing the matter with outsiders. As time passed, sometimes I caught myself wondering if our family harbored genes for schizophrenia or something and I was simply insane. Weren't the twenties the age when these things started to show up?

But it would have to be a collective insanity, because Colette and Cyndi certainly had seen PJ too, and he existed in the voids of Mom's and Dad's silences. So where was he? Who the man in the cloak, and why had he broken his promise? Why wouldn't anyone tell us _anything_?

I'd asked myself these questions a thousand times since that night – while stomping blindly around the neighborhood after a fight with Mom or Colette, while smacking the tiles in the shower in impotent fury as scalding water blasted over my head, while digging my nails into the steering wheel of the car. I'd asked these questions a thousand times, and I was beginning to believe that I would never ever know what had happened to my brother.

These fruitless thoughts occupied me throughout the train and bus rides and the walk to Old Hsiao's shop. Although the Hsiaos were mages too, they seemed to use their abilities rarely and contented themselves supplying the Chinese population of the Bay Area with the best herbs and life advice. Their store was narrow and dingy, with a cracked linoleum floor and scuffed glass counters. Large cases, as you'd find in a bulk foods store, and oversized jars were full of bizarre-looking dried goods. Most of them were stiff and stringy, and the blend of all the scents smelled quite odd. Fortunately I was used to it and mentally blocked up my nose as I walked in the door.

"Nah-tah-sha!" Old Hsiao straightened up behind the counter and gave me a huge grin. "Long time no see, long time no see! What have you been doing lately? Not working too hard, are you?"

" _Gong-Gong hao_ ," I greeted him politely. "Oh, you know, same old, same old. Still helping out in the bookstore. I keep trying to convince my parents to sell some snacks, like cupcakes, or something, but they say that getting licensed is too much of a hassle…."

"Tsk, tsk," he agreed, "they're right, you know." He shook a warning finger at me. "All that sugar is why Americans are so fat!"

I laughed. Chinese people, at least the immigrants, just didn't appreciate the sugar-and-butter-laden glories that were the pinnacle of Western desserts. They were always convinced that a donut would give you diabetes. "Speaking of _healthy_ foods, I'm running low on ginseng and goji again. And would you happen to have shitake mushrooms?"

"Of course, of course," he assured me, moving swiftly around the shop and scooping them into small plastic bags. Back at the counter, he weighed them on a little scale and sealed the tops. "What a good daughter you are, doing your mother's shopping for her."

Something I'd never figured out in all my years frequenting the shop was whether the Hsiaos knew why I needed herbs so often. Did they really believe that I was just a dutiful Chinese daughter? Or was that a façade to protect all of us? Anyway, "a good daughter," sure….

After the obligatory haggling ("Can't you give me a little break? I shop here all the time," "Of course, of course, I always give you the best price. If I go any lower, I'll be taking a loss!" "Well, how about throwing in a few dates then?" "For an old customer, of course, of course"), I walked back out with my ginseng and goji, plus shitake mushrooms and a few complimentary dried dates for Mom. But it was still early and I didn't feel like facing her just yet. Since the weather was nice and sunny, I decided to wander aimlessly around the city for a while. Eventually I wound up in the Tenderloin and was passing a small and utterly unremarkable bar when I glanced inside and saw Cyndi, Ezri, Zig, Sam, and his golem. Now that was an unusual gathering away from St. Anthony's! Curious, I walked in to join them, noting as I entered that a weather-beaten wooden sign overhead said "Twilight."


	2. Chapter 2 Twilight Bar

Chapter 2: Twilight Bar

After the brilliant spring sunlight, my first impression of the bar was of darkness and dinginess. As my eyes adjusted, I noted the scratched wooden floors and the stained tables etched with carvings pronouncing eternal love. In one corner squatted a small stage where I could picture second-rate amateur bands dodging rotten tomatoes; along the opposite wall lounged a long scuffed counter that had seen too many spills. At the far end of it, a white candle sent out waves of sweet jasmine scent in a valiant effort to dispel the odor of smoke (ugh) and beer (bleah). In short, Twilight was the sort of place where I could picture Sam and perhaps Zig (if he'd showered at St. Anthony's _and_ trimmed his wild, wiry black hair and beard), but not Ezri and certainly not Cyndi. Did Cyndi even drink? What in the world was she doing here?

"Hey guys," I greeted them as I crossed the faintly sticky floorboards. "What brings you to a bar at," I checked my watch, "4 p.m. on a Friday? Isn't it a little early to be drinking?"

"Hey"s and "Natasha!"s of varying degrees of drunkenness greeted me. Sam, naturally, was swaying and barely keeping his seat on a bar stool, but Zig wasn't too far behind. When I got close enough to smell him, I briefly wondered if the bartender had lit the candle to cover his odor and then escaped to fresher climes, but no. There she was by the candle down at the end of the counter, wiping it down with a crumpled old rag. Tall, slim, and blonde, rather like a model, she nevertheless had an air of toughness that convinced me she could easily toss Zig out if she found him offensive.

"What will you have?" she demanded in heavily accented English. Russian? Scandinavian? I couldn't place it.

I glanced at the selection of bottles behind the bar, felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity, and asked the others, "What are you having?"

"Alcohol!" cheered Sam, drowning out everyone else's answers as he brandished a large beer mug at me and sloshed its contents everywhere. His golem, which I had dubbed Adam because I could never remember its Hebrew name, stood right beside him and glared balefully down at him. Sam's mentor (who had another unpronounceable Hebrew name) had designed Adam and sculpted it to have the height and build of a football player. The golden-brown clay that he'd selected gave the golem's "skin" a Middle Eastern cast, and at a glance Adam could pass for human. Up close, however, you couldn't help but notice that its skin was poreless and hairless, and that the unruly thatch on its head was only a particularly ugly toupee. Unless Sam reminded it, Adam also generally forgot to feign blinking, breathing, and fidgeting. At the moment it was standing statue-still with its arms folded, its usual posture when it saw Sam drinking or smoking (i.e. its usual posture in general). "Too much drink," Adam pronounced grimly. Sam, in _his_ usual reaction, ignored it.

"Goo' stuff, man, goo' stuff," Zig assured me rather woozily, fumbling for his beer mug and missing it. Was he high again? At St. Anthony's we tried to keep him off drugs, but obviously it wasn't working.

Ezri, who as far as I knew was only seventeen and resembled the kid brother of a boy band star, took a drink from his own glass. "This is an Aberdeen Angus," he explained very precisely. "A mix of scotch and Drambuie in a two to one ratio, with just a dash of honey and a splash of lime juice."

"Soooo it's not virgin then."

"Of course not." His blue eyes looked wounded. "How could you possibly make a virgin Aberdeen Angus when the main ingredients are scotch and Drambuie, which is a mix of more scotch, honey, and spices?"

"Oh, ignore him," Cyndi interjected from inside the hood of her sweatshirt, waving a hand dismissively. "He's just trying to act grown up." Since I'd never seen her drink before, I peered curiously into her glass. A little embarrassed, she hastily explained, "It's Coke. For the caffeine, you know."

Oh, did I ever know! Cyndi actually took the whole hacker-living-on-instant-noodles-and-Redbull thing seriously. I wasn't even certain she could function without caffeine anymore.

"I's a, i's a _verjen_ rum an' Coke," Zig nodded sagely.

"I'll have a Coke too," I told the bartender, whose every motion conveyed disapproval at my unsophisticated palate as she poured a glass and thunked it down in front of me. Ignoring her, I climbed cautiously onto a stool beside Cyndi and perched on it. "So, what have you been up to lately?"

When she was younger, she used to come to our bookstore regularly to search for comic books, video game guides, and, incongruously, biographies of opera singers. (Opera and coding, who'd have thought?) Mom and Dad liked her cheery smile and obvious intelligence and encouraged our friendship. Ever since Cyndi returned from UCLA a couple years ago, however, having dropped out in her last quarter for reasons she refused to discuss, she'd become steadily more paranoid. She wasn't as bad as Sam yet, but these days she restricted her social interactions to online friends with whom she played Starcraft or discussed anime, and real-world friends with whom she texted.

Once, after restocking a collection of horror novels, Dad had proposed facetiously that Cyndi must have turned into a vampire, which would explain her newfound fear of sunlight and her unhealthy pallor. Unimpressed, Colette had protested, "But aren't vampires supposed to have awesome fashion sense?" She did have a point there. Although Cyndi's style had always tended towards the casual (jeans and brightly colored t-shirts with geeky logos), it had now veered off into misanthropic-loner-future-domestic-terrorist territory. On the rare occasions we saw her, she'd be muffled inside an oversized hoodie, face hidden in its shadows. Only when she was alone with me would she remove it to reveal a ratty black t-shirt. Upon hearing Dad's hypothesis, Mom had countered that Cyndi was probably schizophrenic, which was really a shame since she'd been such a promising child. Good thing Mom hadn't seen Cyndi's dyed-black, purple-and-green streaked hair yet! Colette, on the other hand, called Cyndi Emily Dickinson, because computer code was the poetry of modern times.

"Oh, you know, the usual. Designing a website for a new client, which is why I had to come out here for a meeting." Cyndi gestured at her laptop case and plucked uncomfortably at her black hoodie, clearly wishing she were in pajamas. "Um, what else? Playing Starcraft, sooooo much Starcraft. Oh!" She suddenly perked up. "There's an awesome movie coming out at the end of the month! It's called _The Matrix_ and it's about this dystopian future where the entire world you live in is just an illusion. See, the humans lose a war against this amazing super-AI and then machines put humans into a sort of massive farm where they harvest them for bioelectricity to power themselves, but there are these rebels who escaped this farm and they're fighting back against the machines and they're convinced that the main character who's a guy called Neo is 'the One' who will free humanity."

When she finally stopped to inhale, I protested, "Wait, I've seen the trailer. Admittedly, I wasn't paying much attention, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't go into _that_ much detail."

"Oh." She examined her Coke modestly. "I, um, may have hacked Warner Brothers and read their internal memos. I found video files too." She looked back up at me with a resolute expression. " _But_ , they're behind schedule so they're not entirely done with the special effects yet, and I'm _not_ going to watch it until they're all finished!"

"Oh," I said. "Yes, that makes sense." I'd always had mixed feelings about Cyndi's hacking. On the one hand, she wasn't really harming anyone (cheating the movie theater out of one ticket wouldn't make a big difference to its profit margin), but on the other, risking discovery by the Technocracy just to watch a movie for free at home seemed like insane recklessness. Still, we'd argued about it before and Cyndi had been adamant that she could avoid detection (and looked wounded by my lack of confidence), so I'd dropped the matter.

During the lull in our conversation, I heard the rumble of cars grumbling their way uphill; in the distance, a police siren shrilled fiercely and then faded again. While Cyndi and I sipped our Cokes and listened to the sounds of SF, Sam began a semi-coherent political rant (another typical sound of SF, ha). "Did you see the latest budget for education? All of the funding is going to science and tech high schools. That's how they get you. That's how they _get_ you. They get you _young._ "

"Sam," I warned, casting a quick glance at the bartender, who seemed to ignore us in favor of drying glasses and briskly putting them away under the counter.

"Oh, Jasmine's _fine_ ," Ezri assured us airily. "She's nice."

"Yeah man, she's niiiiice," Zig drawled, lighting up a pipe full of noxious-smelling powders. He inhaled deeply and moaned in satisfaction. "Mmmm, you wan' some? You wan' some?" Unsteadily he waved the pipe at us.

Ezri caught the end and held it still to take an analytical sniff. "Interesting," he pronounced after a thoughtful moment.

"Ezri!" I protested.

"What?"

"You shouldn't use drugs!"

"Oh, but they make things so clear, so clear," slurred Zig, breathing out a cloud of disgusting smoke. "You should really try some."

He pushed the pipe at me, but Sam snagged it instead and took a deep puff. "Mmmmm," he sighed, relaxing a little. "Mmmm, this is good stuff!"

"No drugs!" snapped Adam. Distant police sirens underscored the golem's point.

"What _is_ it?" Cyndi asked with a sort of horrified curiosity, raising her voice over approaching sirens.

Before Zig could respond, the siren shrieks reached an apex right in front of Twilight. Tires screeched in agony; car doors slammed like bullet shots. Whirling red and blue lights pierced the windows and splashed over our faces like acid. Then came the awful blare of a megaphone: "EZRI MORNINGSTAR. SIMON RODRIGUES. CYNDI AQUILANTI. NATASHA LAN-TSE LIN. ANDREW ORVILLE. YOU HAVE SIXTY SECONDS TO COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS RAISED."

The Technocracy! How could it be the Technocracy? How could they know who I was? I'd been so _careful_! What could I possibly have done to tip them off?

"I REPEAT, YOU HAVE SIXTY SECONDS TO COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS RAISED."

For one split second we all sat petrified, hearts thumping.

Sam was the first to react. As fast as if he'd been completely sober, he leapt up and tore towards the back of the bar, racing for the bathrooms. Adam stolidly began thumping after him as Cyndi snatched up her laptop case, grabbed me by the wrist, and yanked me after him. All the while, I heard my heartbeat reverberating so loudly that I thought my eardrums would burst, and the world went all blurry. _Is this what happened to PJ? What will Mom and Dad think if I disappear? I can't disappear too!_ When the world sharpened again, Cyndi had cornered Sam in the little dead-end by the bathrooms and was arguing vehemently with him.

"I can't trust you, I can't trust you, I have to get away," he was babbling in a complete panic. His entire body was shaking, and he looked like a wild creature that had been hunted for hours and, cornered at last, was determined to live, _damn it_ , whatever the price.

"Look," she snapped. "Calm down!"

She took a step towards him and he suddenly whipped out a revolver from inside his long coat. We froze at once. Pointing it unsteadily at us with a shaking hand, he repeated manically, "I have to get away, I have to get away."

Leaving Cyndi to reason with him, I flattened myself against the wall and opened my purse with icy fingers. First I drew out a small thermos that already contained water and a few thin slices of ginseng. Unscrewing the lid, I then fumbled around in my purse for my pill box of herbs, feeling as slow and clumsy as if I were in a nightmare, one of those horrible nightmares that had plagued me since PJ disappeared. _I'm trapped, I'm trapped, THEY are going to get me, but if I can just reach my herbs I can fix everything, and the pill box is right there in my purse but it's at the bottom and I can never find anything in my purse because it's like the purse just digests it…._ There. The plastic box felt reassuringly solid to my fingers. Without needing to look, I popped open the "Saturday" compartment, removed a pinch of dried chrysanthemum flowers, and dropped it into the thermos. Then I flipped open the "Tuesday" compartment for a pinch of sweet wormwood, which I added as well. Screwing the lid back on, I shook the thermos vigorously and opened it again to toss the contents straight in Sam's face, casting a calming Life Effect on his body.

"Hey!" he shouted indignantly, instinctively reaching to swipe at his eyes with his dominant hand – the one with the gun. "What the –"

In retrospect, we were probably lucky he didn't shoot us by accident.

At that moment, Ezri and Zig rushed up behind us. With an air of disdain, Ezri surveyed the scene before enunciating, "Jasmine says there's a way out. But we have to decide _now_ and we all have to agree."

"Who's Jasmine again?" I asked, still trying to process everything.

"The bartender. Try to keep up, Natasha."

"Do you trust her? How do you know she didn't betray us? How do you know she didn't call the cops?" Sam demanded suspiciously, twitching the gun towards Ezri. "Keep back!"

"Because she didn't," Ezri snapped back. "Because I think I know who lured us here and it wasn't Jasmine."

"You _know_ who did this? How can you know this? How do I know I can trust you? Maybe you're one of them!"

"Oh my fucking goodness!" Ezri was rapidly losing his temper. He ran a hand through his buzz cut and threw his arm to the side in frustration. "I do _not_ have time to argue with you right now. Are you coming or not?"

"Can anyone teleport us out?" I asked the others.

"Just myself. Not all of us," replied Cyndi.

"Naw, man," said Zig, swaying a little and bracing a hand against the wall. "Not my line."

"No," added Sam, calming down slightly at last. "I can step myself Sideways, but that's it."

"I'm in," I told Ezri. Anything was better than staying here to face the Technocrats. Who, if they knew our identities, would certainly have brought a surfeit of reinforcements and possibly HIT marks as well.

"Give me a moment with him." Cyndi gestured us back and had a brief hushed discussion with Sam that ended with all of us following Ezri back to the bar.

Seemingly bored, as if she had to rescue mages from Technocratic assaults all the time, Jasmine looked up from polishing her counter. "So, you all in? You all have to agree."

"Yes, we're in," Ezri said, acting as our spokesman.

"All right," she shrugged. Casually, she reached under the bar and pulled out bottles of tequila, rum, and Jack Daniels. Admiring gasps from Sam and Ezri suggested that the tequila was very expensive "good stuff;" Zig looked unimpressed. Jasmine slammed down five shot glasses in front of us and poured a precise amount from each bottle into the them. I didn't even need to reach for my scissors and paper to sense magic in the tequila and pouring actions.

"She's _good_ ," I thought as we snatched up the shot glasses and gulped down the drinks. The alcohol and magic burned on the way down, but not in a bad way. It was more like the way a steaming mug of tea might burn your tongue and your hands as you sipped it on a bitterly cold January day, a warming, comforting sort of pain….

And then blackness, like a wash of ink.

* * *

Blurry impressions and muffled sounds began to form through the darkness. I groaned, rubbed my eyes hard, and glanced at my watch: 10:45 p.m. Had we really been unconscious for over six _hours_? What had _happened_? Slowly I sat up on a hard concrete floor. Around me, the others were doing the same, tilting their heads from side to side and painfully stretching out stiffened muscles. Where _were_ we? Looking around, I took in a small room, made even more cramped by thick red padding on the walls and a queen-sized four-poster bed that claimed all floor space not currently occupied by five dazed mages and one impassive golem. Techno music pounded like a migraine through the walls and door. About then, my muzzy mind began to distinguish faint screams and whip cracks above the driving bass.

Had Jasmine betrayed us? Was this a Technocratic prison after all?

"Where are we?" Zig moaned, echoing my thoughts. After whatever-happened-to-us back in Twilight, his hair stuck up all over his head like weeds on a deserted lot, and his black-tea skin tone had faded to the dusty grey of parched earth. On the bright side, he sounded sober. At least our little bout of unconsciousness had detoxed his body.

Sam had been sitting up slowly, clinging to Adam's arm to pull himself up. At the sound of Zig's voice, he bounded to his feet, staggered a little, and crouched in a corner, spinning out his revolver and sweeping it shakily back and forth. If I'd hoped that our little nap had cleansed his blood, I was sadly disappointed – in the strange red room, his hand shook even harder than it had in the bar.

Adam folded its arms and glared at him. "No guns," it pronounced. Sam, unfortunately, once again ignored it.

"Calm down man," Zig advised, keeping a wary but not particularly intimidated eye on the revolver. Best not to speculate about why a drug dealer was unperturbed by gun violence, I decided. Some things you'd rather not know about your friends. "You don't want to fire by accident."

"One of you, one of you, one of you is a sleeper agent!" Sam accused, sounding absolutely petrified. His voice, body, and gun all trembled. I sat very still and hoped his trigger finger wouldn't convulse. "You betrayed us. You trapped us here. You called the Technocracy!"

"Naw man, you need to calm down."

Reverting to her security blanket, Cyndi slid out her laptop and plugged it into a phone jack. The sound of the modem connecting to the internet made Sam jerk. "What was that?" he asked sharply, stabbing the gun in her direction.

Ezri didn't bother to respond, just released the long-suffering sigh of a much put-upon teenager and sauntered over to the door.

"What are you doing? Where are you going?" Sam whirled away from Cyndi to track Ezri's back with the gun.

Pounding music lunged at us as Ezri opened the door to reveal a dance floor teaming with sweaty, half-naked party-goers. Undulating to the heavy beat, they mostly ignored compatriots who were screaming and moaning under the lash of whips. So, not a Technocratic torture chamber but a S&M dungeon? What in the name of all the Traditions were we doing in a dungeon?

Zig surveyed the crowd with professional interest, probably considering drug sales, but Sam recoiled from the surreal scene. "What is this place?" he demanded shrilly. "I've got to get out." His voice rose even higher, and I thought – but decided not to say – that if he were a girl in a romantic comedy, this was the perfect opportunity to faint. He even had a male(-ish) Adam to catch him. Sadly for those of us who liked our skins intact, he wasn't and didn't.

Happily for those of us who had just become avid gun control proponents, Adam provided a distraction. It moved its bulk over to the door (I got out of its way fast, not wanting to be trampled), looked around the dance floor, pointed up, whatever that meant, and began stomping out of the room. Sam pocketed his revolver at last and followed, but not before he addressed all of us in a shaky, suspicious tone, "I'm telling you, one of you, one of you is a spy." Then he staggered out.

Whew! All of us but Zig sagged in relief. Ezri shut the door so we could hear one another and announced, "Well, I do think it was no coincidence that we all ended up in the same bar at the same time."

"So you agree with him?" asked Cyndi neutrally, not looking up from her laptop. "You think one of us is a sleeper agent?"

"Naw, man, it wasn't me. I'm no sleeper agent." Zig shook his head firmly, wiry hair bouncing with the motion.

I crawled over to Cyndi and sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, watching her open a terminal and type in commands. Text flew by as she subverted electronics to her Correspondence Effect.

"No," Ezri clarified. "I think someone else lured us all here with an Entropy Effect."

Grainy grey footage from security cameras throughout the building began to pop up on Cyndi's screen. She clicked between windows for a moment, pausing at one that showed a rowdy bar and another that recorded a darkened street. "Got it. We're in the basement of Twilight."

"The basement of _Twilight_?" I asked, unable to believe that the non-descript little bar could harbor such an elaborate club.

"I could have told you that." Ezri pulled out a handkerchief-sized piece of cloth and began inspecting the corners of the room.

"Whatcha doing?" Zig inquired, mildly curious.

Ezri stabbed his head under the bed. His muffled voice explained, "Looking for mold. This room is way too clean."

"I'll go talk to the dancers," Zig offered. "Find out more." And sell some drugs? I wondered. Music blared briefly as he exited. Feeling useless, I stayed with Cyndi, who was now searching a floor plan for a safe exit and scanning the neighborhood for Technocratic activity.

"So, what should we do now?" I asked.

Examining security footage from nearby buildings, Cyndi suggested, "We should find a safe place where we can talk."

"That sounds like an excellent plan." Ezri wriggled back out from under the bed, smugly clutching the fabric, which was now streaked with black mold.

"How about my bookstore? We have a sanctum."  
"You have a sanctum?" For once, Ezri's teenage ennui evaporated. "That's _awesome_. What time?"

Cyndi was already pulling up the bus and Caltrain schedules. "How about...midnight?"

"Yeah, that works," he agreed.

Someone fumbled at the door and Ezri and I looked up sharply. "It's just Zig," Cyndi told us.

A moment later, the man himself entered to report that Twilight had been open for eighteen years and was one of those exclusive clubs where you had to know someone to get in. Given the nature of what we'd seen in the basement, I wasn't too surprised. "There's a fire exit we can use," he added.

"Oh yeah, I knew about it," said Ezri, the insufferable seventeen-year-old.

As I raised an eyebrow at him – what was a minor doing in a dungeon, and where was the parental supervision? – Cyndi rapidly checked the exit. "It's a dead spot for the cameras, so that's good. No one will see us leaving. Give me a minute and I'll map out a safe path."

"Well, I'm going to hang out here for a while. I'll see you at midnight." Ezri strode out into the party before anyone could protest. By this point, I was pretty sure that he didn't come from anything resembling Mom's idea of a Good Family, even before his mom vanished. But that was his dad's problem, not mine.

While Cyndi searched for the best route to the Caltrain station, I pulled out the bright green jade pendant I always wore under my clothing. The Wonder felt cool and comforting in my hand; it was shaped in a common Chinese design, a flat disk one inch in diameter with a hole in the middle, and hung from a simple platinum chain. Created by an ancestor far more skilled than I, it had been passed down in Mom's family for generations. (Colette had an heirloom Wonder too, an appropriately lilac-and-white jade bangle that shielded against Spirit and Time. Just because Chinese families felt the necessity of sons didn't necessarily mean that they disregarded daughters. Humans were far more complicated than magic.) Although I couldn't work any Correspondence or Time Effects myself, all I had to do was activate the Wonder to ward myself. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to extend the protection to Cyndi.

"Got it!" she announced, rotating her laptop triumphantly to show Zig and me a satellite image. "See, we go up the stairs and out the fire exit into this alley, and then we follow this path away from Twilight." With a finger hovering just above the screen, she traced a winding route through the streets.

"And then we end up here?" Zig stabbed a dirty finger directly onto the screen. Cyndi winced and nodded. "Shall we?" he drawled.

Cyndi visibly hesitated, torn between hurrying to safety and cleaning her screen. I settled the matter by rubbing off the smudge with my (100% cotton) sleeve. "Let's go."

On our way towards the exit, we glanced back to see Ezri across the dance floor from us, frowning contemplatively at a rack of floggers.

"He is way too young for this," I muttered.

Zig giggled suddenly, an unexpected sound from the large man. "S and M. Slime and mold. Spores and mildew. Get it? Get it?"

His little joke made us laugh as we climbed the dank stairwell, pushed open the battered old metal door, and stepped out into the clean, fresh night. Inhaling deeply, the three of us trotted away, putting several blocks between us and Twilight before Zig split off with a nodded farewell. Together, Cyndi and I continued the long trek to the Caltrain station. (Apparently she'd decided that the buses were too risky.)

After several minutes of companionable silence, she inquired, "So how's your family doing?"

"Eh, they're okay." I waited for a few drunken revelers to jostle past, glanced around to make sure no one was in earshot, and lowered my voice. "Nothing's been the same since, you know."

She lowered her voice too. "Natasha, I'm so sorry, I haven't found anything. I'll keep looking."

"Yeah. Thanks." The proper thing to do would be to thank her for her concern or express appreciation for her efforts or something like that, but I couldn't form the words. As I groped for a change of topic, a car pulled up to the curb beside us.

We looked over nervously, but it was only Ezri. "Want a ride down?" he called.

"Of course!"

"Yes please!"

We piled in gratefully, and he handed me the mold-stained cloth before zooming towards the freeway. "Can you take a look at that, Natasha? I did an Entropy Effect after you guys left, and I found that the Technocracy lured us there but they didn't set the trap knowing who we were specifically."  
"So how'd they know our names?" Cyndi asked while I began extracting supplies from my omnivorous purse.

"Rodrigo," he hissed. "Fucking Rodrigo."

"And who exactly is this Rodrigo?" Cyndi persisted.

Only half-listening to their voices, I carefully cut a sheet of red paper into the outline of a house, with six stylized figures standing under its roof. Then I spread the cloth out flat across my lap and laid the paper cutting over it.

"Oh, he's this Technocrat who keeps calling me," Ezri was saying in an offhand tone.

A strangled exclamation from Cyndi.

"It's fine, I just ignore him."

"You just _ignore_ him?"

"That's not the _point_ here."

"Okay, how is that _not_ the _point_?"

Now I pulled out a small thermos of ginseng-infused water (I always carried spares) and mixed in goji berries for seeing and monkshood root for hunting. Once I'd given the mixture a few shakes, I tilted the thermos and dribbled the herbal medicine over the paper cutting and cloth, working slowly in the unsteady car.

At once the Technocratic plot became clear. "They set an Entropy Effect that was a long time in the making," I said absently. An Entropy Effect, an Entropy trap. Casting my mind back, I reviewed the events of the afternoon. Had I noticed anything unusual? That would be the point of Entropy, wouldn't it, to tip the balance towards a rare event? Fight with Mom, pretty common. Trip to Old Hsiao's shop, impulsive but not uncommon. Exploration of the city, okay, that was more atypical. Oh. The girl. The little girl on the train to whom I'd given the paper cutting. Normally I'd never be so careless about anything with traces of my Resonance, my magical signature, on it. Was that how they'd identified me? Was that the Entropic trap at work?

I dripped more herbal medicine onto the cloth and made sure that I dampened all the mold. "I can sense the Resonance too, let's see…. It's manipulative, the deliberate omission of information." Whoever had laid the trap wasn't a very nice person. But that was a given for a Technocrat.

"Hmmmm," Ezri muttered darkly.

"Is that Rodrigo's resonance?" Cyndi asked him.

"Maybe," was all he'd say.


	3. Chapter 3 The Sanctum

Chapter 3: The Sanctum

By the time we reached Palo Alto, all the restaurants and shops on Cal Ave had long since closed for the night. I'd warned Ezri not to park near my house in case we woke Mom and Dad, since the very last thing I needed was to get caught in an interrogation before we decided how much we wanted to tell anyone. Under the silent streetlights, we crept into a parking spot in front of Starbucks and hastily walked down the sidewalk, turning onto Birch and tiptoeing up to the fence around Lin's Books. Although Dad had set up Correspondence wards here too, I could disable them without triggering any alarms as long as he hadn't set them up to watch for me. I could only hope that he and Mom had concluded I was off complaining to friends and would come home when I felt like it, and they'd see me first thing in the morning.

"Shhh," I cautioned Cyndi and Ezri, fighting my purse until it yielded my Hello Kitty keyring. The gate opened with a creak as usual and latched close behind us with an unconscionably loud thud. Cyndi winced noticeably and pulled her hood even further forward, but Ezri just turned around and stared at it thoughtfully for a moment, perhaps wondering if he could grow mold or mildew on the wood slats. I'd have to deter him, but later. Right now we had a sanctum to sneak into.

Past a table and two lawn chairs I led them, under the awning and into the darkness of the bookshelves. Like Theseuses (Thesei? That didn't sound right either) we passed through the maze, Cyndi and Ezri following silently behind me, knowing the place almost as well as I did. The back door yielded another gut-wrenching thump when we shut it behind us, and we froze for a minute to listen anxiously. Our luck held (perhaps some cosmic sense of justice deemed that we'd suffered enough for one day), and the house remained silent. Good. Gesturing Ezri aside, I opened the storage closet by the back door and walked in among the mops, laundry detergents, and other cleaning paraphernalia. "Come on," I whispered.

They hung back, eying the tiny space dubiously.

"It seems a little…crowded," Cyndi whispered back.

I grinned at them, even though they couldn't see it in the dark hall. "Come in and you'll see." Reluctantly, they crammed themselves in with the heaps of boxes and stacks of toilet paper. "Close the door," I directed Ezri. Giving me a doubtful look, he obeyed. Now a narrow door would appear on the left-hand wall under a shelf of cleaning agents. In the dark, no one could see it, of course, but I knew where the doorknob would be and squeezed sideways between two large cardboard boxes to reach it. Silently the door swung away from us, revealing the brightly-lit, spacious room beyond. "Behold the Lin family sanctum," I whispered.

Awed expressions on their faces, Cyndi and Ezri groped their way after me into the room. Once we'd shut the door, I spoke normally. "This place is soundproofed and warded like crazy – well, apart from Spirit wards – so don't worry about waking my family."

"This is amazing!" exclaimed Cyndi, staring around her and immediately spotting the antique rosewood desk that had been hauled into the twentieth century via the addition of a power outlet and phone jack. "Oooh, internet!" Claiming the modern, ergonomic office chair (a matching rosewood chair would look great, but lack of carpal tunnel was even better), she slid her laptop out of its case, plugged it in, and waited impatiently as the modem began its familiar gargling song.

Two soft brown suede sofas, rather than the carved rosewood frames with hard cushions that you saw so often in Chinese living rooms, were another concession to comfort. Arranged along the wall on the left, beside the desk, they overlooked a coffee table on which Colette, who had an artistic bent, had arranged a selection of my parents' knick-knacks – olive pits carved to resemble tiny boats, complete with figures of men in the windows and miniscule doors that actually opened and shut; a fine porcelain bowl painted with bamboo and birds, probably from the Qing Dynasty; a pair of swans knotted from silk cords, their necks and heads forming the two halves of a heart, that Colette and I had made as children in Chinese school; and, gazing down serenely from the lotus that bore her heavenward, the graceful white porcelain figure of Kwan Yin, Goddess of Mercy. The rest of the Lin family treasures, including the silver pocket watch destined for PJ, reposed in a curio cabinet against the opposite wall, guarded on either side by bookcases laden with ancient magic texts and scrolls. Finally, across the room and an intricate royal blue Oriental rug from us was a kitchenette supplied with mismatched mugs and an electric tea kettle.

While Cyndi began compulsively checking her email and all her forums, Ezri toured the room slowly, pausing in front of a trio of scroll paintings depicting beautiful women that hung over the sink. Though they'd been framed and magically sealed to protect against moisture, I suspected that he was wondering whether he could grow fungi on them.

"Not in the sanctum," I warned him. "Believe me, my parents will notice if a cluster of mushrooms pop up in here!"

He spun around, innocence painted all over his face. "Oh, I wouldn't!" He didn't sound too convincing though.

Cyndi didn't lift her head from her laptop as she asked us, "All right, what's the plan?"

"We should check on Sam," Ezri suggested. "Does anyone have his number?"

That was a good point. Sam being Sam, he was much too paranoid to give any of us a way to – heaven forbid! – _find_ him, but I had an idea. "I'll ask Colette."

Having seen the two together a few times, Ezri snickered. "How's _that_ going?"

I rolled my eyes at him, picturing Colette's adoring gaze and worshipful tone whenever she spoke to Sam, and his half-bewildered, half-flattered attitude towards her, as if a puppy had followed him home and he really didn't want a pet but couldn't bring himself to take it to the pound either.

Despite being a college senior, Colette kept abominably early hours and was sound asleep when I snuck upstairs into her bedroom. "Colette!" I hissed in her ear. "Colette!"

She started awake. " _Jiejie_ , you scared me! Where _were_ you? Where did you _go_? Mom and Dad were so _worried_!" Thus spake the perfect daughter.

"Never mind all that. I just need Sam's number."  
She sat upright in shock. "Sam's number? What happened? Is he all right?" And a little tardily, "Why do you think I have his number?"

"Because you just told me that you do."

"Did not!"

"Shhhh! Do you want to wake Mom and Dad?"

She glared at me, rather like the way Adam glared at Sam. Was she taking lessons from the golem now?

"It's urgent. I'll explain later."

"Fine!" She capitulated, got out of bed, removed a sparkly, beflowered address book from a desk drawer, and flipped through it rapidly. "Here." She shoved it at me and climbed back under the covers. Pulling aside the curtain for moonlight, I read and memorized the number (written in lavender glitter pen).

"Thanks. Go back to sleep. Don't forget we're in charge of running the bookstore tomorrow."

"You should have thought of that before you _woke_ me."

I shut the door on her indignant expression, narrowly missed tripping over Cookie on the stairs, and re-entered the sanctum. Cyndi, of course, was still parked firmly in front of her laptop, now checking new posts on a Starcraft forum, but Ezri had discovered our collection of rare books. He stood in front of a bookcase, tenderly cradling an account of the founding of the Akashic Brotherhood, to which all Lins belonged but yours truly (who couldn't decide on an appropriate Tradition and dithered for so long that Dad decided it made no difference whether I chose one at all). The book was one of the few extant copies and had come from a bibliophilic ancestor. Ezri was bent over the thick creamy pages, puzzling out the copyist's handwriting. Sensing my approach, he looked up a little guiltily and reverently replaced it on its stand. "Did she have it?"

"Yep." I crossed the rug to poke Cyndi in the arm. "Sorry, Cyndi. I need the phone line."

"Oh!" She gave a start. "Yes, of course! Let me log off."

As soon as the line was clear, I picked up the warded phone on the desk and dialed the number Colette had given me. It rang…and rang…and rang with no response. Either Sam had been so paranoid that he'd given Colette a fake number, or he was so paranoid that he didn't answer his calls. Either was likely. Cyndi and Ezri watched me in silence, waiting, waiting. On the tenth ring, the answering machine beeped (that was it, no prerecorded greeting), and I hesitantly left a message, hoping he'd actually listen to it. "Hey Sam, this is Natasha. Cyndi, Ezri, and I are at the bookstore. Um," I thought that it would be safer to be vague, "give us a call back."

After I'd hung up, Ezri shrugged practically. "He'll get it when he gets it. Let's proceed without him."

Plugging her laptop back into the phone jack, Cyndi nodded her assent. "Yes. Yes, I think that's a good idea."

Before we could start discussing the Technocracy's Entropy Effect or interrogating Ezri about his connections to this Rodrigo character, though, the shrill of the bookstore phone shattered the stillness. Brriiing, brriiing, brriiing! Taken unawares, Cyndi actually jumped a little and I emitted a squeak. "One-way soundproofing?" asked Ezri, looking impressed.

He'd be less impressed if my parents charged downstairs to demand what we were doing in the sanctum in the middle of the night! I made a dash out of the room, knocking over a broom with an unfortunately loud clatter as I forced my way through the storage closet, and dove for the phone beside the register just on the last ring. "Hello?" I whispered breathlessly.

"Natasha!" Sam wheezed, sounding as if he were fighting off a panic attack and barely holding the upper hand. "Natasha, you scared the hell out of me!"

"We found out some things – "

"Not now!" he cut me off urgently. "It's not safe." A pause and deep inhalations on the other end. "Okay, okay, okay." I could _hear_ him struggling to calm down. "Okay. I'm going to another payphone. Call me back in ten minutes at this number." He rattled it off and hung up.

Well, weren't we lucky that I had a good memory?

Apparently, the cosmic sense of justice now ruled against us, because I heard Mom calling from upstairs, "Who's calling at _this_ hour?" From the position of her voice, she'd already walked out into the hallway. As quickly and quietly as I could, I tiptoed back towards the storage closet. Then the perfect sister spake from her bedroom, "It's for me!"

"Why are your friends calling you in the middle of the night?"

"It's about a problem set!"

Leaving Colette to pacify Mom, I hurried back into the sanctum, practically knocking Ezri and Cyndi in the noses with the door (they'd been pressed up against it, listening their hardest), and booted Cyndi off the phone line a second time. "What did Sam say?" she asked as she sadly disconnected her laptop yet again.

"He wants us to call him at a payphone in ten minutes."

"Sounds like him," Ezri remarked, flopping down on a sofa.

While counting off the minutes, we made a little small talk about Cyndi's latest favorite anime and Ezri's newest crop of mushrooms (these mushroom spirits, he assured us, were particularly feisty). A few polite taps at the door interrupted us, and Colette strode in wrapped in a bathrobe, hugging Cookie tightly in her arms. She plopped down on the other sofa, fixed us with a stern gaze, and announced, "Okay, I sent Mom and Dad back to bed. Now what's going on?"

"Ummm." The three of us eyed one another uncertainly.

"It's a long story," Cyndi offered tentatively.

"I don't have class tomorrow. I can stay up late. Now talk."

Cyndi and Ezri looked at me as if to say, "You deal with your sister!"

Fair enough. "Okay. First of all, don't freak out. Everyone's fine." I stared at Colette until she nodded. "But we think that the Technocracy cast an Entropy Effect to lure all of us to a bar in SF." That was as far as I got before my sister, predictably, freaked out.

"The Technocracy?!" Colette squeaked and tightened her hold on Cookie until the poor cat squirmed wildly. "Oh, sorry, sorry." She relaxed her arms and leaned over to kiss Cookie on the head, but the cat was unappeased and leaped from her lap to streak behind the sofa.

"I told you not to freak out! We all got away, and we just wanted a quiet place to talk. So we came here."

Ezri smirked a little at the brevity of my version.

"Natasha, it's time," Cyndi warned.

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to call Sam back."

"How is Sam? Is he okay? Why isn't he with you?" Colette kept badgering me with questions as I dialed the payphone number. Behind me, Ezri and Cyndi made soothing (and ineffectual) comments at her. On the third ring, Sam answered.

"Hello?" he quavered.

"It's Natasha."

"Natasha!" Had he expected a Technocrat? "Okay." His very voice sagged with relief.

"Yes. So, Cyndi, Ezri, and I are at the bookstore. We need to talk about what happened – " I kept it vague because Colette was now at my shoulder, straining to catch Sam's words; I tried futilely to elbow her back, " – because it wasn't a sleeper agent, it was a Technocracy Entropy Effect, so you should come down."

"I can't, I can't, I can't. They'll get us. They'll get us. We all have to split up, we have to go to ground, we have to hide."

"Calm down, Sam."

"Calm down?! How can you tell me to calm down after the Technocracy almost got us?! This just proves me right!"

Ouch. I held the phone away from my ear while he ranted, and Colette seized her opportunity. "Let me talk to him," she mouthed at me and took the phone. In a tone like a caress, she greeted him, "Heeeeey Sam." Ezri and I snickered a little too loudly as Colette turned bright red but hastily stopped when she spun around to glare at us. Her tone was at complete odds with her face as she continued, "Yeah, I've been doing well. Uh huh, uh huh, I heard. Yes, I know you're scared, but don't you think you'll be safer with more information?" A pause. "Besides, you haven't seen our sanctum yet. It's _very_ safe. Yes, yes, of course. No! I'd _never_ lure you into a trap! Never never never!" Her obvious sincerity and concern must have smoothed away his panic attack, because she handed me the phone. Covering the receiver, she whispered to us, "He's going to come, but first he wants to tell you something."

I took the phone. "Hey."

"Natasha." His voice was almost normal again. "Do these mean anything to you?" He began reciting a list of three-letter combinations, which I repeated to the others. "PJL."

Colette, Cyndi, and I all gasped at the same time. "PJ!" Colette gave a little cry.

"PJ?" Ezri asked, perplexed.

"Yes," Cyndi explained. "Their little brother. He disappeared a year ago."

"I'm so sorry." Ezri petted Colette awkwardly on the shoulder. "My mom and my mentor have also disappeared."

Meanwhile, Sam had continued to read off initials, and I repeated them mechanically without parsing them. "JMF. DCE. KYZ. TPL. OBF. HSJ. VNM. BJN. AKM. VRG. FRJ. RPG. SNB."

At "DCE," Cyndi's eyes widened and she began typing frantically into her browser, only to sag when she realized that she had no internet connection.

"Do they mean anything to you?" Sam repeated.

Through a lump in my throat, I replied, "Yes, I think they're initials." I couldn't say anything more. Oh, PJ, how did you get swept up in this mess? Childhood is the kingdom where adult machinations die…or never exist at all….

On the other end of the line, Sam's voice said, "Okay. I'll be there." Click.

For a moment I stared dumbly at the phone. Oh PJ, my brother, why does Sam know your name? Where are you? What happened to you?

A hand gently removed the phone from my hand and replaced it in its cradle. Cyndi's voice, a distant sound, murmured, "I think I know what's happening. PJ was – is," she hastily amended, "a Mind mage, right?"

"Yes," I replied numbly, watching her connect to the internet and log onto a Starcraft forum. "What does that have to do with anything?"

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Colette had bowed her head before the statue of Kwan Yin and pressed her palms together. Her eyes were squeezed tight as she silently prayed to the Goddess of Mercy.

Cyndi explained, "DCE is probably my UCLA adviser, Dr. Etrin. She vanished too. Actually, it looks like a lot of people who do brain research have been disappearing lately."

"Brain research?" Ezri mused. "Why would the Technocracy target them?"

"I don't know." Cyndi began writing a post on the Starcraft forum (what an odd forum to choose!) to ask how long Mind mages had been disappearing. The answer came almost instantly – fourteen months. Fourteen months! Colette and I stared, stricken, at each other. That was exactly when PJ had left with that mysterious man!

Just then, Ezri stiffened, staring at the air by the door. He pulled out a jar of mushrooms from a pocket, removed one plump cap, and held a one-sided conversation with it.

"A spirit?" guessed Cyndi.

"A ferret spirit is sniffing around in here," Ezri explained. "I've asked a mushroom spirit to talk to it." His head swung around the room in jerky motions, seeming to follow some sort of tussle or wild scramble. Rapidly cutting a red paper blossom for Prime sight, I saw a ferret and a mushroom playfully fighting and rolling all over the carpet. Despite my fear for PJ, I had to smile. They _were_ pretty cute. "Oh, it's Sam's spirit. He sent it on ahead to scout the place." An expressive eye roll conveyed Ezri's opinion of Sam's paranoia.

"I think he's here already," Cyndi alerted us. In the span of a few minutes, she must have set up her own Correspondence spells to surveil the bookstore.

Promptly and predictably Colette offered, "I'll let him in," and slipped out quickly. Cookie seized the opportunity to dart out after her, almost colliding with Brownie, who strolled in and wagged her tail gleefully at us. Love me, love me, she seemed to say. I'll make everything better! I picked her up and cuddled her, pressing my cheek against the top of her head. Oh, Brownie, do you remember PJ? Do you miss him still?

That was how Sam and Colette found us, Sam with an oddly gentle expression on his face as he softly clicked the door closed, Colette with her face lit up like a Christmas tree, birthday cake, and string of Chinese New Year firecrackers all mixed together.

"Here, have a seat." Colette guided him to my sofa, where he sank down into the other end. "Please, please, make yourself at home. Would you like something to drink? Tea? Water?" She suddenly noticed that none of the other guests had refreshments. " _Jiejie_! You should have offered them something to drink!"

It was true. I had definitely violated one of the central tenets of Chinese-dom – feed people. Feed them the best food you have available, feed them until they beg you to stop not out of politeness but because they can now empathize with geese being fattened for foie gras. How could you have forgotten? Colette's accusing tone demanded. Oh, how about – I nearly got kidnapped by the Technocracy, nearly got shot by your beloved over there, got knocked out magically and woke up in a S&M _dungeon_ , nearly got shot by aforementioned beloved _again_ , and just had it confirmed that my baby brother has fallen into Technocratic clutches? How's that for an excuse for violating good-hostess rules?

I already knew it wouldn't suffice. "Drink, anyone?" I asked, standing up. "We have filtered water and tea here, and if you want I can get orange juice, milk, and snacks from the kitchen."

In the tones of one dying on a desert planet, Cyndi begged, "Something caffeinated, _please_."

"Tea sounds good," said Sam, gazing at Colette.

"I'll take some OJ," answered Ezri.

"I'll get the OJ and snacks if you make the tea," offered Colette. Without waiting for my nod, she slipped out.

As I filled the tea kettle with water and prepared a porcelain teapot, Sam began to speak. "Okay, so I don't know if you guys know how I do magic, but I use numerology and have prophetic dreams." Ezri nodded in comprehension. "In December of 1997 – so over a year ago – I dreamed that I was standing in a beautiful field of flowers. In the field was a stone arch with a missing keystone, and each stone had letters on it referring to people."

"How did you know that?" asked Cyndi.

Sam shrugged. "I just did. But then the keystone with the letters PJL appeared out of the sky, shouting for help, and fell into the arch. As soon as the arch was completed, it began sucking everything through. All the flowers were getting sucked into it."

"That's pretty creepy," observed Ezri.

"PJ is the keystone?" I protested. "But he's just a kid!"

"You know him?"

"Yes, he's my little brother! He disappeared last year."

"I'm so sorry, Natasha, but there's more."

I poured tea for him, Cyndi, and myself into a trio of mismatched mugs then perched on the edge of the sofa, staring at him intently. Colette returned bearing not only a bottle of orange juice, which she handed to Ezri, but also a bowl of fruit salad and bags of potato chips and cookies, which she arranged on the coffee table. Sam waited until she'd sat down between the two of us before he continued. "Today, while we were knocked out," ("Knocked out?" asked Colette in alarm, but I shushed her) "I had another dream. The arch had grown and turned into a tunnel that had pulled everything through. The ground was bare by now, and the land itself was warped." I shuddered at the image, and Colette's eyes widened. "I heard the sound of a kid – a girl – crying, and I knew it was JMF. I walked up to the tunnel and looked for something so I could pry out a stone. A snake slithered by and turned into a staff."

"A snake turning into a staff," interjected Cyndi. "What does that mean?"

I remembered a fragment from _The Ten Commandments_ movie. "Doesn't that sound Old Testament-y?"

"Yes, _Jiejie_ , don't you remember? It's in the book of Exodus: 'and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent'." Trust Colette to be studying the Old Testament/Torah!

"Yes, that's exactly right." Sam looked impressed and pleased that someone appreciated his culture and religion.

"So what happened after you performed a reverse Moses?" I asked sarcastically. "Did Pharaoh appear or something?"

Sam shot me a reproving glare. "I was going to use it to pry out a stone, but just before I could touch the tunnel, the dream ended."

"What does that _mean_?" Cyndi asked again.

"I don't know," Sam replied.

"Well," suggested Ezri in a determined voice, "why don't we figure it out together?"

"Sure, but we'll have to find a way to make our Paradigms mesh."

Colette leaned over and whispered, "What was he talking about? What did I miss?"

I explained as gently as I could, "Sam dreamed that he saw an arch where each stone had someone's initials on it. The keystone said PJL."

"PJ!" Her eyes filled with tears. "What does it mean that he's in an arch? He's still alive, isn't he?" she pleaded.

Overhearing her, Sam quickly turned away from Ezri and placed a tentative hand on her arm. "Hey, don't cry. We'll find your brother. I promise." Colette sniffled a little and bowed her head. Petting or hugging just wasn't in my genetic makeup, so instead I dumped Brownie in her lap. She sniffed again and petted the poor dog with such intensity that I expected to see to see fur flying.

Meanwhile, Sam and Ezri had decided that they could combine their ways of doing magic by smoking a psychedelic mushroom together. Kwan Yin have mercy. " _Please_ don't use something pungent!" I implored them. "My parents will kill me if this place smells like a drug den!"

"Don't _worry_ , Natasha." Ezri rolled his eyes. "The smell will fade in no time."

I didn't trust his assessment but had no choice. Surely Mom would forgive us if we explained that we were searching for PJ.

Watching Ezri pack mushroom bits into his and Sam's pipes, light them, and take a deep puff, Cyndi observed, "It's going to be a loooooong night."

"Oh, right, I can fix that." Glad for something to do, I sprinkled some monkshood into both our mugs and swiftly turned our regular oolong into super-caffeinated-oolong-on-steroids. Then we sipped and watched as Sam and Ezri collapsed like rag dolls and began slurring nonsensical words and fragments of words to each other. While waiting for them to exit their trance, Cyndi investigated some of the initials from Sam's dream. First she sent Dr. Etrin an email to check on her, and then she did some discreet digging on Starcraft and anime forums until she connected "JMF" with an online friend, Sailor Saturn, who seemed to have gone inactive recently. The click-click-click of her keys formed a very odd background for Sam and Ezri's communion with their psychedelic mushrooms.

After an hour or so, we heard very familiar and very loud footsteps clomping up to the bookstore door. "Oh, can't he make that golem quieter?" Cyndi complained, echoing my thoughts exactly.

" _He_ didn't make Chochmat-Nefesh," Colette immediately defended Sam. "It was Rav Nachman Ha-Kadar." As usual, the names slipped right out of my mind again. Trust Colette to have mastered the pronunciation!

Somehow, enough of this conversation penetrated the foggy haze around our dream-interpreters (sounds so much better than "druggies") that Sam lumbered to his feet. "I'll jus' go, go let it in," he mumbled and swayed his way out of the sanctum. Clomp clomp clomp clomp came Adam's footsteps until they both entered the room and Sam slumped back down on the sofa beside Ezri. Both of them drew deeply on their pipes. "Mmmmm," they sighed blissfully.

Entirely unimpressed, Adam leaned down and snatched the pipes right out of their hands. "No drugs!"

"Wha – ?"

"Hey! Give that back!"

"No. No drugs."

"But we're not doing drugs. We're using it as a Focus to, to, to interpret my dream."

"No."

"Ohhhhhh…." Since it was futile to argue with an implacable clay creature, Sam and Ezri slowly drifted back into lucidity. When they were again capable of forming coherent sentences, they explained that the arch or tunnel was somehow connected to the Technocracy's endgame. More than that, they had not been able to see. (Here Sam glared at Adam.) "Oh yeah," he added, "I told a friend about the first dream – "

"Who?" we demanded, less out of security concerns than shock that Sam had _friends_. Well, technically we counted as friends (probably), but he had friends he actually trusted?

"Just a friend," he replied evasively. That was more like the Sam we knew. "Anyway, then I received a letter out of nowhere thanking me and saying 'it's being taken care of'." Sam made air quotes. "It was signed Cassandra's Handmaid."

" _What's_ being taken care of?" That was Ezri.

"Who's Cassandra?" wondered Cyndi.

"And who's her _handmaid_? That sounds like something out of Greek mythology," I added.

Sam made a gesture of frustration. "Look, I don't know. I've told you everything I know." Which was patently untrue, given his level of paranoia and vagueness about his "friend," but we dropped that line of questioning.

Perhaps we'd have interrogated him further if it weren't the middle of the night, but by then it was so late that we were approaching morning from the wrong end, and Ezri and Sam looked as if they were on the verge of collapse. Naturally, Cyndi planned to stay up for hours yet, but Colette and I (well, mostly Colette) decided that it was as good a time as any to pump up the air mattresses and bring out the comforters and pillows. Leaving Cyndi frowning at her laptop and Sam and Ezri sighing as they stretched out on the mattresses, we tiptoed upstairs to our own bedrooms. Brownie followed me into mine and leaped onto my bed, curling up in the dead center while I was busy changing into pajamas. After a short tussle, she ceded two-thirds of the bed to me and then emphatically threw the length of her back along my leg as soon as I lay down, pressing up against me with a long-suffering sigh.

And so ended my extremely dramatic, extremely long day.


	4. Chapter 4 Too Many Questions

Chapter Four: Too Many Questions

As faithfully as Brownie, the nightmares had been waiting for me all day, and as soon as I tossed and turned myself into sleep, they pounced. One after another they came, the old and the new, begging for attention and fighting for time. There were the old favorites — I was late for a test; I'd completely forgotten to study for the test; I was biking to the test but my bike wouldn't move and I couldn't get off and run. And the newer breeds – I was fleeing the Technocracy but my feet wouldn't move; PJ was standing in the middle of a busy street and I was trying to scream a warning at him but no sound would come from my throat; I was watching, frozen, as Technocratic agents burst into our house to shoot us all. It wasn't even that terrible things actually happened in the dreams – I always woke before I failed or missed a test, or the Technocracy caught us or shot us, or a car struck PJ. It was the sheer terror that I felt within the nightmares that would wake me with a jolt in the middle of the night and leave me feeling panicky and restless for hours. In the beginning I'd mixed sleep aids, but those only held me in thrall to the dreams all night long, unable even to wake so I could read or pace until I calmed down enough to fall back asleep for another round of nightmares. Then I'd tried turbo-caffeinated drinks à la Cyndi so I could avoid sleeping altogether, with the predictable effects on my physical and mental health. Mom and Dad had put a stop to _that_ experiment by counter-spelling my drinks, but neither of them could do anything about the quality of my sleep. These days I just went to bed when tired and took my chances with the nightmares.

Luckily, counterintuitively, the dreams the night the Technocracy almost caught me were relatively muted, as though the nightmarish quality of reality had partially sated my subconscious. Rodrigo's disembodied voice shouting my name did make a cameo in one, but when I woke at 8 a.m. on Saturday, I didn't feel nearly as frazzled as I sometimes did.

I was even dressed and breakfasted in time to help Colette open the bookstore. What a surprise.

"I think they left," was her greeting when I joined her in the shop.

"Who? Mom and Dad?" I yawned. "They always go to that Chinese place for _shaobing_ and _youtiao_ on Saturday mornings." My brain still felt foggy, and I couldn't imagine why Colette was stating the obvious.

"No, sillyhead. Our _guests._ "

Oh, right. Our _guests._ "Wait, they left?" Hurriedly I checked my phone, but no one had texted me. "Why did they leave?"

Just then, chimes heralded the entry of a mother and an entire host of children, the oldest of whom needed SAT prep books and the younger ones novels for English classes – the usual mix of Steinbeck and Tan, Bradbury and Shakespeare. Helping them track down paperback copies in the specific editions requested by the teachers kept me too busy to brood over yesterday's revelations or wonder where the others had gone, and in any event, Cyndi, Sam, and Ezri soon returned, Starbucks cups in hand, acting like ordinary customers.

"Oh, Natasha," Sam called as the door slammed behind them, "has the Confucius _Analects_ arrived yet?" (From the test prep shelf where the oldest son was comparing the _Princeton Review_ and _Barron's_ editions, the mother glanced over at Sam, impressed that this _lao wai_ was so knowledgeable about Chinese philosophy.)

Before I could answer, Colette popped up. "Yes, I'll get it right away." And she darted off.

"Well, while she's getting it," Ezri said, enunciating for the benefit of any Technocracy spies, "maybe you can help me find a book on mushrooms. I want one with good color photos…."

Still talking a little too loudly, they drew me away from the other customers into the gardening section (located outdoors, appropriately), where they updated me on pieces of the story they'd discovered. Unfortunately, all we had were fragments – Dr. Etrin had already responded with great enthusiasm to Cyndi's email, showing suspicious curiosity as to her whereabouts; Ezri had shared that his mom had vanished fourteen months ago, just like PJ; and under intense questioning (probably by Sam), he'd reluctantly divulged that Rodrigo's voice was so familiar because the Technocrat called him every two weeks to ask if he wanted a "checkup." (What?!) Beyond that Ezri categorically refused to elaborate.

What did all these pieces of information mean? Who could help us interpret them? Sam's mentor had vanished three years ago (Cyndi was already combing the internet for clues, but that would take time), and Ezri's was missing too. If Cyndi and Zig had mage contacts, neither was volunteering the information.

"Well," I sighed. "I guess we should talk to my parents."

Steeling myself against the inevitable hue and cry, I led the others into the kitchen, where Mom and Dad had returned from their favorite restaurant in Cupertino with a take-out Chinese breakfast assortment – soy milk, long deep-fried _youtiao_ , chewy flat _shaobing._ At the sight of the two of them sharing a private, almost peaceful moment as they savored their meal, my courage failed me. How could I intrude with the report of their worst fears come true? The Technocracy had identified me and probably the entire family by now, and had kidnapped PJ and, if Sam and Ezri's drug-fueled hallucinations had spoken true, was doing unspeakable things to him. Maybe I shouldn't torment them with fragments of facts yet. Maybe I should wait until we knew more.

While I dithered in the doorway, for better or worse, Sam took the decision out of my hands. From behind me, he greeted them politely. "Good morning, Mr. Lin, Mrs. Lin."

One glance at me and their parent-dar set off alarms.

"Natasha, what's wrong?" Mom demanded.

I hesitated, trying to find a gentle way to break the story.

Nope, nothing was coming to mind.

"Before you start, do your friends want something to eat?" Dad suggested courteously. "As you can see, we have way too much to eat ourselves – " he gestured at the heap of _youtiao_ and _shaobing_ and styrofoam containers full of soy milk – "and we have American breakfast foods as well. Toast, eggs, muffins, cereal, fruit – what would you like?"

Mom was already bustling around the kitchen, pulling out plates, bowls, and utensils, and bringing over folding chairs. Between her and Dad, they quickly had everyone seated at the table with some form of solid or liquid breakfast. "It the Asian feed-people gene," I explained to Ezri, who looked a little bemused as he poked at a _youtiao_.

"Ah," he nodded and, with an air of teenage nonchalance, took a big bite.

Satisfied that no one was going hungry, Mom turned her attention back to me. "Now what's wrong?"

"Um, okay. So, um, yesterday, I went up to SF and hung out with these guys."

"Where?" she instantly asked. I'd been hoping to leave that part out.

"We were at a bar."

"You didn't get into a bar fight, did you?" My senses tingled as she Prime-scanned me for signs of recent healing.

"What? No!"

"Did you do property damage? Did you get arrested? Is that why you came home so late?"

"No! Of course not! Why would I do property damage? I'm perfectly capable of going to a bar and drinking responsibly, you know!"

At this point, Sam wisely intervened before the conversation degenerated into another mother-daughter screaming match. "Mrs. Lin," he explained, choosing his words slowly and deliberately, "we don't want to alarm you, but the four of us and another friend had a brush with the Technocracy." That was _one_ way of putting it.

"A brush with the Technocracy?" Dad demanded.

Ezri made a dismissive gesture. "Yes, but it was _fine_ because the bartender is a friend and she got us out of there."

From the looks on Mom's and Dad's faces, I could tell that they most definitely did _not_ think that it was "fine." I jumped in. "But that's not what we wanted to ask you. What we wanted to talk about are these dreams Sam has been having." I got excited. "He saw PJ! We can find PJ if we figure out his dreams!"

They sat, stunned, as Sam described the stones with initials and the keystone that said "PJL." Tactfully he omitted the parts with the keystone shouting for help and the JMF stone sobbing quietly, but it was already a hard enough blow for my parents. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Then Mom said to Dad in a low urgent tone, "They've found us. We need to run."

He replied soberly, "We need to wrap things up here. It will take a few days."

"No, we need to leave _now_."

I felt as if I were in a nightmare again, one of the ones in which I was trying to shout but couldn't force the air out of my lungs. "What do you mean, 'run'?" I squeaked. "What about PJ?"

"Lin Lan-Tse," Dad said, and I knew it was very serious when he used my Chinese name, "the fact that the Technocracy came that close to capturing you yesterday means that they know exactly who everyone in this family is. That means that we need to run before they come for us."

"But what about PJ? We need to find him!"

"We can't do anything to help PJ," he replied sadly. "His fate was out of our hands the moment we entrusted him to Xavier."

" _Xavier_?" asked Ezri sharply.

"Yes," Dad said. "We knew your mentor." He explained to all of us, "We received a letter from Cassandra's Handmaid – " Cyndi and I gave each other quick glances – "telling us that PJ needed to go into hiding and arranging for Xavier to take him to safety. But as you know, both of them disappeared." Mom bowed her head.

"When was this?" Ezri demanded.

"Who's Cassandra's Handmaid?" Sam asked.

"We don't know," Dad told Sam. To Ezri, he replied, "Xavier came for PJ late at night on January 9, 1998."

"But," said Ezri, looking puzzled, "Xavier and I went into the Umbra earlier that day. We got separated. So he came out again, picked up PJ, and then went somewhere else?"

"So it appears."

I protested, "Now we have a lead! We should all work together to figure out where PJ and Xavier and those other kids are so we can rescue them!"

"Rescue them! Are you crazy?" Mom shouted. "Are you even listening to yourself? The Technocracy has taken out the most powerful mages in the world! They assassinated the Council of Nine! What makes you think _we_ can take them on?"

I couldn't believe it. "So you're just going to _leave_ PJ?"

Sam murmured, "We're not the cavalry," and Ezri nodded his assent.

Dad interjected, "Natasha, we love your brother dearly, but we have to be realistic. We simply don't have the power or resources to challenge the Technocracy. The only thing we can do now is save the remaining members of the family."

Childhood is the kingdom where no one has to make hard choices….

"Well, I'm not going. I'm going to stay right here and find PJ."

"Young lady, you are leaving with us and that's final."

"No, we should at least _look_ for him before we run away!"

My friends exchanged awkward looks, clearly asking themselves what was the polite thing to do – play peacemaker? Tiptoe out and leave us to our family fight? Sit there and pretend nothing was wrong?

 _Analects_ in hand, Colette wandered into the kitchen, and I seized upon this new ally. "Colette, tell them we have to stay here and look for PJ!"

"It's foolishness to sacrifice the entire family! We are leaving as soon as we can!"

Poor Colette looked utterly bewildered but, at a glance, knew she wouldn't get anything sensible out of us if Mom and I stayed in the same room. "Why don't you mind the bookstore while I talk to them, so there's someone out front?" she suggested to me.

"Fine!" I shoved my chair back with a horrible squealing sound of wood on tiles, and stalked out. With mumbled thanks, my friends quickly dropped whatever bits of food they were pretending to eat and scurried after me, Sam pausing to take the _Analects_ and thank Colette. Behind us, I heard her asking, "So what's going on?"

Back in the bookstore, I manned the register while Cyndi, Ezri, and Sam drew up chairs nearby and we discussed our next move under the cover of a debate over Confucianism. "No, no, no, you're interpreting that completely wrong," Ezri exclaimed while Sam pointed to random passages in the book and shouted, "But Confucius clearly says here that – " and so on. When I walked over to "calm" them, Cyndi whispered that she'd received a ping on her phone apprising her of an odd development online – on a Starcraft form she frequented, a user named Kitsune had posted the name of Sam's mentor, and now other users were bumping it up repeatedly so it remained the first hit. But what did that mean? And who was Kitsune? What did he or she have to do with Sam's mentor?

"Can you contact Kitsune and ask?" I suggested.

Sam, as expected, was adamantly opposed. "No, it's a trap for us, another Technocracy trap. That's how they'll get us."

To my surprise, Ezri agreed with him. "There's a good chance that it's bait. I think we need to find out more before we try to talk to this 'Kitsune'."

"Okay, but how? Obviously my parents don't know anything and don't plan to find out anything. Cyndi doesn't have a mentor that I know of." We raised our eyebrows at her, but she declined to comment. "And Sam's and Ezri's mentors have both disappeared. So whom can we ask?"

"I'm not sure we should be asking for help," Sam pointed out. "We are _not_ the cavalry. The best thing to do may be to keep our heads down and stay out of sight."

Cyndi noted, "Except that's what we've _been_ doing and they almost got us anyway."

"All the more reason not to go poking our noses into things!"

"Let's talk to Jasmine,"Ezri said, suddenly perking up. "She'll know what to do."

A brief silence fell as we mulled over this plan. On the one hand, none of us but Ezri knew her and she _could_ be a Technocratic spy. Despite their self-confidence, seventeen-year-olds were far from infallible. But on the other hand, she _had_ hidden us from the Technocracy. But on yet another hand, she hadn't been very reassuring about it – her demeanor had proclaimed indifference to our fate, and her Effect had bludgeoned us hard enough to knock us out for several hours. But on another hand still, she hadn't exactly had much time to wrangle over magical subtleties with us with the Technocracy right on her doorstep…. At this rate, I was going to have as many hands as an alien.

Finally, Sam broke the silence. "You're sure we can trust her?"

"Yes, of _course_ we can trust her." Delivered with exasperation.

Another thoughtful pause. "Well," said Cyndi at last, "I _would_ like to ask her a few questions."

So it was decided – whether or not we were the cavalry was very much up for debate, but at least we were an intelligence agency of sorts. Or investigative journalists. Something of that ilk, with an inquisitive bent.

"Right, I'll call Zig and have him meet us somewhere," Sam said and headed outside with Adam to find a payphone.

"How are we getting up there?" Cyndi asked practically. "Can we all fit in Ezri's car?"

We did a quick head count: Cyndi, Ezri, Sam, Adam, me. Technically three of us could squeeze into the backseat, but Adam was really _big_.

I said rather doubtfully, "I could ask to borrow our car, but I think Mom needs it for grocery shopping."

"Maybe we could put the golem in the trunk?" Ezri proposed.

"That would be so awkward if we got pulled over. Having a body in the trunk?" I exclaimed.

Cyndi groaned. "Not to mention a body made of animated clay?"

Ezri threw up his hands in frustration. "We'll be in trouble no matter what if we get pulled over! Because believe me, the only people who'd pull us over would be the Technocracy."

A rather irate Colette interrupted this fruitful conversation. "Why aren't you helping the customers? I just convinced Mom and Dad not to move to Europe this minute. You were supposed to be running the store!"

Right, about that. Giving her my toothiest grin, I complimented her, "Great job! Now we need to run up to SF for something, so can you watch the bookstore while I'm gone?" Behind my back, I made urgent "get up, get up" gestures at Cyndi and Ezri. As we edged towards the exit, I called, "I'll make it up to you!"

Hands planted indignantly on her hips, she yelled after me, "You'd better!"

* * *

As it turned out, Sam had arrived by moped the night before and had had the foresight to attach a sidecar for Adam. Personally, I didn't think the golem should be so visible in public, but if Sam's paranoia were at a manageable level, I wasn't going to say anything. After agreeing to meet at a Starbucks in SF, the rest of us piled into Ezri's car (which I Correspondence and Time warded, just in case). On a Saturday morning, few cars were on the freeway, and our drive passed uneventfully except for Ezri's sudden panic attack over whether we should involve ourselves in all this. Our argument was thankfully interrupted by the arrival of a mail spirit, bearing, of all things, a message from Sam to Jasmine. Stymied by the wards around Twilight, it had identified us as the best surrogates to deliver it. Considering that the note asked Jasmine to meet us at Starbucks and delivering it ourselves would have been absolutely pointless, Ezri rolled his eyes and threw it away. Cyndi did try to call her, but no one answered the phone at Twilight. Given that it was 11 a.m. and all revelers were probably still asleep, it was hardly surprising that a bar would be closed. We did drive past it to confirm what common sense told us.

Arriving before Sam, Adam, and Zig at Starbucks, we commandeered two of the little round tables in a corner and took turns ordering. Ezri, being Ezri, got a coffee, split it between three cups to the barrista's confusion, and added a mushroom to each. Cyndi had a double espresso (of course) and a pastry for the sugar jolt, and at my persistent poking added an oatmeal cup for some minimal nutritional value. While we waited and Ezri toyed with his mushrooms, we speculated as to the Technocracy's plot. Was it experimenting with ways to brainwash all of us "reality deviants"? Was that why they needed Mind mages and neuroscientists?

Since we weren't getting anywhere, Ezri decided to grow some mushrooms in the trash can. He worked an Entropy effect to distract the barista, "accidentally" spilling coffee and asking for towels. While he cleaned up, he scattered some spores on the damp towels before tossing them in the trash. What he hoped to accomplish by growing mushrooms in a trash can in Starbucks I wasn't sure, but before I could ask, Sam, Adam, and Zig entered.

"Good morning!" Zig greeted all of us cheerfully. " What's up?" He looked as crumpled as if he had slept in a dumpster. I decided not to ask where he'd spent _his_ night.

"Has Sam updated you on our plan?" Ezri asked, scooting his chair over to make room for them.

"Yep," said Zig. " We're going to talk to Jasmine."

Sam scanned the other customers suspiciously before leaning over to whisper, "I sent her a message asking her to meet us here."

Ezri rolled his eyes at that. "We _know_. The spirit couldn't get through the wards at Twilight so it gave _us_ the message to deliver."

"Oh, for —" Sam was so exasperated he couldn't even finish his curse.

"Language," warned Adam.

"I didn't swear." Sam glared at it.

"Well," Cyndi broke in. "Why don't I set up a warded phone call to Twilight? Ezri?"

"Yep, let's." A few keystrokes later, Cyndi nodded at him, and he dialed Twilight's number (which he'd apparently memorized). The conversation with Jasmine, unsurprisingly, was terse. "Hey, Jasmine, it's Ezri. Uh huh, no trouble at all. Everything's fine." A pause. "Want to meet us at Starbucks so we can talk?" A longer pause. Ezri winced a little. "Okay, okay, _fine_ , we can come over. Ten minutes is fine. Okay, see you then." He clicked shut his phone and shrugged.

"Twilight in ten minutes?" Zig asked. "Thought it was closed. How're we going in, man?"

"It's open now."

Sam, naturally, focused right on the logistics. "It's _open_? How are we going to have a private conversation with Jasmine then? Also, how are we getting in there? We can't just all walk up to the front door. The Technocracy is just _waiting_ for us to make a mistake like that!"

Ezri rolled his eyes again. "Relax, Sam. I wasn't suggesting that."

* * *

Indeed, ten minutes later, the rest of us tiptoed (well, stomped slightly less loudly in Adam's case) around the back of Twilight and slipped down into the dungeons while Ezri strolled in the front disguised via a Life Effect as a homeless urchin. (Although why he thought it was realistic for homeless, underage urchins to stroll into bars was quite beyond me.) After a tense, blind wait in one of the bedrooms — Cyndi had botched her attempt to hack the security cameras and drained her laptop batteries — Ezri came to fetch us. At Sam's dubious look, he explained that Jasmine had said the wards in the bar were stronger.

Trying to act normal, we followed him up a dank narrow stairwell and emerged into the room where we'd been cornered by the Technocracy not a day ago. There was the long bar where we'd sat, there was the door through which Rodrigo's voice had blared…. And now everything was quiet and peaceful, a few blissfully ignorant Sleepers lounging about the tables enjoying a solitary mid-morning beer. As before, a stern-looking Jasmine stood behind the bar, wiping down the surface and keeping an eye on the customers. This time, though, as soon as she saw us, she ordered loudly, "Everyone out! The bar is closed."

The Sleepers looked up blearily.

"But I haven' fineeshed…" one started to protest.

A glare from those fierce eyes cut him off. "I _said_ , the bar is closed. I want everyone out now. Unless you don't plan on coming back here again, Tim?"

Mom would _kill_ us if we treated any customers this way. Although sometimes I certainly wished I could. "How is this good for business?" I murmured to Cyndi, who only quirked a distracted smile.

It did take some more time for all the customers to settle their tabs and stumble out, but once the last one was on the sidewalk, Jasmine shut and locked the front door. "Now, what do you want from me?" she demanded, crossing the room to put the bar back between herself and us.

Ezri opened his mouth, but Sam burst out, "What the f— " Adam poked him hard — "happened yesterday? What did you _do_ to us?"

She stared at him icily. "I saved your lives, did I not?"

"How? Why? What did you _do_?" Sam demanded again, voice shaking.

Cyndi intervened at this point. "I think what Sam is trying to say is that we appreciate what you did for us yesterday." She gave him a meaningful look, and he dropped his gaze to his hands, which were trembling uncontrollably.

"Yeah," Zig added. He'd seated himself at the bar and pulled out a pipe. "It was really cool, man. What you did, I mean. Not the part where the Technocracy almost caught us." He put the pipe in his mouth and inhaled deeply.

Jasmine was unappeased. " _This_ one doesn't seem to think so." She jerked her head in Sam's direction.

Cyndi continued in her peacemaker role. "We're just scared, and confused. We don't know what's going on, we don't know whom we can trust, and we just found out a lot of information we don't know how to process." She gave the most concise summary possible of the arch and the initials and the disappearances, but even then Sam protested every other sentence that we were giving away too much. "We were hoping you could help us," she concluded, resolutely ignoring Sam. (Zig leaned precariously over from his bar stool to give Sam a comforting pet on the shoulder.)

Throughout the recital, Jasmine's expression had remained unchanged. "Fort Ord," she said crisply. "Find out what's going on there and I'll tell you more."

"Fort Ord?" Ezri asked.

"'S down in Monterey," Zig explained helpfully.

"I _know_ that." Ezri seemed to be on the verge of losing his temper. "What does Fort Ord have to do with anything? You were my mom's _friend_. Why won't you tell us anything? Why won't you help me?" Toward the end, his questions turned into a plea, and for once he sounded scared, and seventeen.

His mother's friend gazed implacably at him and then at each of us in turn. "Consider it a test to see if you're trustworthy." At that Sam sputtered furiously, while Zig raised his eyebrows in amusement. "Find out what's happening at Fort Ord and return here. Then we'll talk."

* * *

Back out on the sidewalk, dismissed as abruptly as those Sleeper customers, we made our plans. Cyndi would take the rest of the day to investigate both Rodrigo and Fort Ord, and Zig would inquire on the streets about missing people with initials on our list. We'd reconvene again the following morning to discuss their findings.

It was a good plan, but it left me with nearly a full day to kill — wait, bad choice of words. I'd never felt more helpless. PJ was being tortured by the Technocracy, Mom and Dad wanted to drop everything and run away, and my friends and I were all on the Technocracy's hit list. What was I supposed to _do_ with myself when there wasn't anything useful I _could_ do? I felt jumpy and restless, and I just couldn't bear the thought of facing Mom and Dad, who'd be anxious and unhappy (and it was all my fault, or at least it felt like that, for giving us away to the Technocrats), or Colette, who'd be anxious and unhappy _and_ annoyed (and it was my fault again, for abandoning her when I was supposed to help run the bookstore).

A responsible, mature adult would go home, console her parents and apologize to her sister, and help them analyze the options open to the family.

Right. Maybe another day.

Instead, I hopped on a bus to Chinatown and bought more herbs. After all, you never knew when they'd come in handy, right? I took my time with my selection, too. Then I had lunch at a hole-in-the-wall dumpling place, taking so long with my meal that the owner came over to inform me that she needed to close down the restaurant between lunch and dinner. After that I rode the bus around the city for a few hours, resolutely reciting poems in my head to block out any other thoughts. Finally I dragged myself home in time for dinner and another fight over whether we should run or stay. By the time I walked in the back door, Mom had already packed half our possessions, and there were boxes and packaging tape everywhere I looked. She'd even gone into my bedroom and started to sort my clothing, which I found particularly irritating.

Suffice it to say that Dad and Colette wisely absented themselves during the loudest part of the screaming match.

Eventually, after the dust had settled, Brownie and Cookie had slunk out from under various beds, and Dad and Colette had emerged cautiously from her room, where they'd probably been performing a rational, mature analysis of our options, Dad proposed (and Mom and I reluctantly — for opposing reasons — agreed) that they would leave in exactly one week. They needed time to prepare for our escape anyway because, as Dad pointed out, vanishing without a trace takes careful planning.

That meant I had seven days to find my brother.

Spent from the fight, I wearily climbed the stairs to my room. As I shut the door behind me, my phone pinged with text from Cyndi. "Just got this message," she wrote. "From Cassandra's Handmaid. 'Your info, your mission.'"

And what was that supposed to mean?!


	5. The Not-Cavalry's First Meeting

Chapter 5: The Not-Cavalry's First Meeting

Completely unsurprisingly, Colette did not appreciate being left alone to run the bookstore again while I drove into the city to meet the rest of the Not-Cavalry. "You ran off yesterday too!" she protested, blocking the door with her hands on her hips and a very Mom-like expression on her face.

I was just lucky that our parents were in the sanctum, painstakingly wrapping heirlooms in bubble wrap and packing them into large cardboard boxes. Come to think of it – how were they planning to hide that level of activity from the Technocracy? If we were under surveillance, how would the Technocracy not notice their trip to the U-Haul store to buy boxes? Presumably they had a plan. After all, they'd escaped from Taiwan and lived peacefully for thirty years. I had to trust that they knew what they were doing, because I'd go crazy if I thought about the alternative. Bad enough that the Technocracy had PJ – but Mom and Dad and Colette too? I wouldn't be able to bear it.

It was far easier to _act_ than to wait and worry. Which, if I were being honest with myself, was part of the reason I was focusing on PJ. That, and I truly believed I had a chance of finding him. The optimism of youth? A passionate desire to distract myself when my world was collapsing all around me? Did it matter?

"Just one more time?" I wheedled Colette. "Please?" I could have added that I'd be out looking for our brother, not partying, but that seemed unfair. I'd save the guilt trip for an emergency.

"I do have a paper to write, you know."

A paper? At a time like this? How very Colette. "Unless you disown Mom and Dad, you're moving to goodness-knows-where in one week. Who cares about a paper?"

"Yes, but if we _don't_ end up moving, I'll have to submit it so I'd rather get it done just in case."

I had a headache, from the conversation and the nightmares. "You're way too responsible."

"Aren't you lucky that I am?" she asked snidely. "Since you always need me to cover your shifts?"

"I don't _always_ – " I bit back the rest of the sentence. No point in offending the person who, if not always, at the very least _frequently_ covered your shifts. "Thanks, _meimei._ I'll get you ice cream to make up for it. What flavor did you want this time? Chocolate and chive? Lavender and potato chip?" As if to compensate for her general lack of adventurousness, Miss Goody-Goody had a wild streak when it came to ice cream flavors.

A glare. "Peanut butter chocolate," she enunciated very precisely.

"Done." Running out the door, I called over my shoulder, "I'll get you a quart!"

"You'd better!" I heard before the door slammed shut.

* * *

I waited until I'd turned onto Page Mill before I let my face sag. As skeptical as Colette (and Mom and Dad) would be to hear it, I didn't actually enjoy running off and leaving her to do the responsible thing. I didn't actually enjoy being the "irresponsible one" or the "flighty one," the daughter over whose exploits all the Chinese aunties and uncles clucked their tongues, while Colette was the "steady one," the "dependable one," the one Mom and Dad could rely on in their old age. (Well, fine, technically PJ, as the son, was supposed to be their staff and support, but he was so much younger that we'd never viewed him as more than a baby.) But what was I supposed to do? Suddenly start acting like Colette? That would be too close to admitting that I'd been in the wrong through all these years of amiable impulsiveness.

And anyway, wouldn't Mom and Dad worry even more if I suddenly started acting _serious_? Kwan Yin have mercy on us all – the day I started behaving like a mature adult would be the day Rodrigo-the-Technocrat ascended to heaven on a lotus blossom.

Sometimes, though, I hated myself for causing my family grief. Sometimes I hated whatever-it-was in my personality that made me restless, that compelled me to go do whatever-thing now, not later, but _now_ , because now was the only right time to do it and later would be too late.

Good thing Mom and Dad weren't like that, good thing Colette wasn't like that. Otherwise I might need to worry that they'd vanish while I was in SF. Logically it was the best course of action – the Technocracy would never expect them to leave me behind, so this would be the perfect time to escape. Plus I'd already – very loudly and very insistently – expressed my determination to stay.

Would they run, while I was meeting with the others?

Would I return to an empty, dusty house?

I was almost tempted to turn the car around and drive back to reassure myself that everyone was still there, but I fought down the urge. I'd have to park the car and walk into the house, I'd have to face Colette and feel guilty all over again, I might very well have to explain myself to Mom and Dad, and so forth. And I'd have to admit to myself that I didn't trust them not to abandon me.

They wouldn't abandon me. Of course they'd never abandon me. Parents didn't just abandon their children – even really annoying ones who kept fighting with them – that way.

But I couldn't be absolutely certain, so it was preferable to speed up the 280, blasting the music too loud for thought.

* * *

To keep the Technocracy guessing (and to find somewhere Zig would fit in), we'd chosen a branch library in San Francisco for our next meeting place. After getting lucky and finding free street parking a couple blocks away, I gave the steering wheel one final tight squeeze, heaved a long sigh to exhale all my worries, and pasted a cheery smile on my face. Then I slung my purse over my arm and walked briskly into the library, where I found Ezri, a stack of biology textbooks in his arms, giving a librarian his best A-student grin. Lurking by a nearby bookshelf, I eavesdropped as he convinced her to let him reserve a conference room without a library card so he could work on a very important group project. It was even sort of true. To aid the pretense, I turned quickly into the science section and grabbed a few random books before following Ezri into the conference room. The others straggled in within the next ten minutes, Zig eliciting a very skeptical glare from the librarian, who apparently couldn't believe that a homeless guy could be integral to a high school group project. Maybe we could say that we were interviewing him on the plight of the socioeconomically disadvantaged population in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Once we'd shut the glass door firmly and hunched over the table with our backs to the large windows opening on the main reading room, Cyndi pulled out a set of glossy satellite photos of Fort Ord.

"Did you hack the CIA or something?" Sam asked, impressed by the resolution.

She only smiled mysteriously. "The quality should be better, actually," she said, laying down another photo and pointing out the sharpness of the areas bordering Fort Ord. "See how high the resolution of those trees is, compared to this building?" Indeed, the contrast was jarring.

"A Correspondence ward?" I guessed.

"Almost certainly," she agreed.

"Wha's zis? Zis here?" Zig might be a little drunk, but that didn't stop him from noticing a building with heavy traffic around it, and some odd modifications that we couldn't quite make out. Perhaps seeing the world through a perpetual haze of alcohol and hallucinogens helped him interpret blurred photos. The CIA should hire him as an analyst.

"I think it's HQ," Cyndi said.

"We should find out more about it then," I said. "Is there anyone at all who might have connections?"

At that, Sam suddenly started wheezing and gasping for air.

"Calm down," Adam ordered.

"Last night – last night." Sam paused, gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles turned white, and continued shakily, "I checked into a motel. A new motel. No one – _no one –_ should have known. But there was a, a letter waiting for me." He fumbled in his coat pockets until he fished out a crumpled piece of paper, which he dropped on the table. In elegant script was the exact same message Cyndi had received:

 _Your info, your mission._

 _\- Cassandra's Handmaid_

"Wuzzat, wuzzat – can I see?" Without waiting for a response, Zig half sprawled across the table, slapped his palm down on the letter, and clumsily dragged it back towards him. Before we could stop him, he started to shred it as a focus for a Mind Effect.

"What are you doing?" Sam exclaimed.

Zig ignored or, more likely, didn't hear him. Holding up a strip of paper languidly and squinting at it with unfocused eyes, he mused, "I's, i's, wha's the word, i's _concern_."

Sam had the most hilarious look of consternation on his face, while Cyndi appeared to be fighting back her shock. Presumably reading about drug addicts online was entirely different from interacting with them in person. Naturally, our little seventeen-year-old was unfazed. "I think Zig means that whoever wrote the note felt concern," he helpfully interpreted.

Interesting. Suddenly I remembered that I had the letter from Cassandra's Handmaid to my parents, which I'd snagged earlier but hadn't examined yet. Early this morning, I'd been awakened by the sounds of Mom and Dad wrestling large, heavy suitcases into the tiny storage closet. While they were occupied in the sanctum, I'd snuck into their study and ransacked their desks until I found the letter from Cassandra's Handmaid, tucked carefully at the back of an album of PJ's baby photos. Extracting it and my scissors from my purse, I neatly folded the paper into sixteenths about its center, made several strategic cuts, and unfolded it again to reveal a circle of smiling little boys holding hands. "I got her Resonance," I reported. "It's 'one who is never believed.'"

Sam snorted. "Figures."

" _Iliad_?" asked Ezri, who probably hadn't read it in English class yet.

"Yep."

"I can get you a copy." I made an effort to distract myself and half-heartedly joked, "We have one in the mythology section of the bookstore. Only $6.99."

"Ha ha, very funny, Natasha."

While we bantered, Sam rescued a piece of his letter from Zig's ministrations and shakily sprinkled olive oil all over it and the table. (Cyndi hastily moved her laptop out of spatter range.) "There, there, there was Entropy going on the room when this was sent. It has the same Resonance as Natasha's letter."

"Let me have that?" Ezri reached for the greasy scrap and dropped a few spores onto it. Immediately one sprouted into a plump brown mushroom. "Don't trust Cassandra's Handmaid," he warned it, and the spirit bobbed a little in reply. "Here." Ezri opened a jar he had in his backpack and removed a piece of bloody cloth using tweezers while explaining to us, "It's from the dungeon."

"I'm not sure I wanted to know that," I told him, leaning away. "Are you _sure_ you're not going to get AIDS?"

Ezri only rolled his eyes expressively and offered the fabric to the mushroom. It suddenly ballooned to two feet in height, and its cap split open to reveal rows of razor-sharp, glistening white teeth. With one swift predatory lunge, it snatched the cloth, devoured it, and vanished with a pop. Cyndi shrieked.

"What the _hell_ was that?" Sam demanded.

"Language!" Adam snapped at him.

"Who the hell cares! Did you _see_ that thing?"

"Was that supposed to _do_ anything, or are you just growing pet monsters?" I asked.

Totally unconcerned, Ezri shrugged. "Oh, that's my sort-of guardian spirit, Enoki. He teaches me how to make the world an easier place for mushrooms to grow."

"Uh, so why are you feeding him bloody cloth?"

"Because he's a detritivore." He might as well have added an eye roll and condescending " _Duh_."

So very helpful. Why was Ezri wasting time on mushroom agriculture? Did he even care that people were vanishing, or that the Technocracy was after us? Did he really trust his sketchy connection with Rodrigo to save his skin and his avatar? How much more immature could he get? I struggled to control my temper. Breathe, Natasha. It's not Ezri you're angry at – it's the Technocracy. Even if Ezri does have disturbing links to it. Such as a known Technocratic agent who calls him regularly.

Wait, what if _Ezri_ were a mole? He did know everything about us, after all. Had he suspected that PJ was Awakened, with a knack for Mind magic? That night in the sanctum, Ezri had acted as if he hadn't even known we had a brother, but what if that were all an act? Could _he_ have betrayed PJ, us, and his own mentor?

How well did I know him, really?

No, no, no, that was a very Sam way of thinking. I was not going down that path. I'd only drive myself mad. I'd made the decision to trust the others, and I wasn't going to rethink it.

Alone among the rest of us, Zig had watched the mushroom affair with perfect equanimity. Head resting on one arm on the table, he looked up sideways and said in a complete non sequitur, "Y'know, JMF is Jennifer Frank. Her parents don't remember having a daughter at all."

Cyndi snapped to attention. "Are they Sleepers?"

"Yesh."

"Do you know any of the other initials?" I pressed.

"Yesh." I wanted to shake him, but before I resorted to violence, self-preservation led him to continue, "I know two of the other names. Young mages who van- van- _disappeared_ two and six months ago."

Young mages. So far, all the initials we'd identified – apart from DCE – corresponded to people under the age of 18. The Technocracy was targeting _children_. Who'd have thought they'd sink so low? Under the table, I clenched my fists and swore that if I ever met a Technocrat, I'd wallop him (or her) with a nice blast of Prime. _Then_ I'd ask questions.

Judging by Ezri's fierce expression, he was entertaining a similar fantasy. "I propose we follow a Technocrat home, drug him or her, and then interrogate – "

"Are you _mad_?" cried Sam, as usual our voice of restraint. "Drug and interrogate a _Technocrat_? Bring the entire Technocracy after us? How many times do I need to tell you – we are _not the cavalry_!"

"Do you have any better ideas?"

"I thought you agreed with me, Ezri! This is madness. This is just what they're waiting for. It's the perfect opportunity – they lure us in, and then, when our guard is down, when we're least expecting it, they get us. That's how they get you."

I wasn't even certain what he was talking about anymore. "Um, just to clarify, you're saying that the Technocrat whom we drug and interrogate is the bait, and they're just waiting for us to commit a home invasion?"

" _Yes_! You felt that Entropy Effect that drew all of us to Twilight. They're powerful, they have resources, they have the patience to set elaborate traps. How do you think they get people?"

A tiny electronic ping made him jump and scan the library through the conference room windows. "What was that?" he demanded, clapping a hand to his pocket. When he pressed down the material, I saw the outline of something bulky and disconcertingly gun shaped.

In answer, Cyndi pointed at her laptop, on which she was busily reading an email. "I just heard back from Dr. Etrin. That's DCE," she clarified. "She's offering to buy me plane tickets to fly out to California."

"California?" I asked, puzzled. Last time I checked, San Francisco _was_ in California.

"She thinks I'm in Boston."

"Niiiiice," Zig said approvingly, trying and failing to braid shreds of letter paper. Giving up, he began to pack them into his pipe. Well, at least I'd never heard of _paper_ giving anyone lung cancer.

"That's really suspicious," Ezri said to Cyndi.

I agreed. "She's way too pushy."

"I know," said Cyndi, looking a little offended that we didn't trust her to discern the obvious.

At that moment, a voice echoed in my mind, "Having an in will make this much easier." As surely as I had felt her Resonance on the letter to my parents, I knew it was Cassandra's Handmaid.

Judging by the stunned expressions on everyone's faces (except for Zig's, which merely looked contemplative), they'd heard her too. Leaping to his feet and sending his chair toppling, Sam yanked out his gun and pointed it around wildly. "Show yourself!" he shouted at the ceiling corners. "Enough with the mysterious letters and cryptic hints! Stop being a coward and show yourself!"

Cyndi, Ezri, and I hastily ducked out of the direction of bullets should Sam squeeze the trigger by accident. Zig, whose head was on the table and below gunshot range anyway, chuckled softly. "Put tha' away, man," he advised. "'Less you want us to get kicked out."

Indeed, other library patrons were beginning to turn in our direction. For all that San Francisco had its share of colorful characters, a trench-coated madman brandishing a gun in a public library was surely a new one. Caught in their line of sight, Sam froze like a deer in the headlights. "Away," Adam ordered firmly, pushing Sam's arm down.

"I suggest we leave now," Cyndi said, shutting her laptop with a decisive snap.

"But what's our plan?" Ezri protested as we stood and helped her shove photos back into her laptop case.

"Well, we're supposed to find an 'in' to Fort Ord, right? Let's drive down there and see." It made perfect sense to me. Both Jasmine and Cassandra's Handmaid were steering us towards Fort Ord and its unsavory activities. We had no idea how to infiltrate the military base, but Cassandra's Handmaid had recommended we find an "in." What better place to locate said useful contact than near the fort itself? After a brief argument, the others succumbed to my impeccable logic (or, more likely, surrendered for lack of better ideas).

Now it was Cyndi's turn for an excellent Bambi impersonation. "Uh, I think – " she began nervously, obviously casting about for an excuse to escape back into her sanctuary. She hadn't traveled south of Palo Alto since she'd returned from UCLA and obviously had no desire to do so, especially not to scout a Technocratic stronghold. "I'll be more useful at home, doing surveillance," she concluded in a rush.

I teased halfheartedly, "You just don't trust my driving right?"

In reply, she smacked me with a photo.

* * *

Halfway to Monterey, I had to admit that _I_ didn't trust my driving. Sitting ramrod straight in the front seat, Sam scanned the road and scrutinized every other car, alternately puffing nervously on his pipe and or swigging vodka from a hip flask like some Prohibition-era mobster. (If Adam were in the front of the car, he would have stopped Sam, but unfortunately we'd stashed the golem in the trunk.) Sam's general twitchiness was making _me_ jumpy. Meanwhile, reclining lazily in the backseat, Ezri and Zig were indulging in some really strong marijuana. Knowing Mom and Dad, even in their distracted state they'd notice if the car seats smelled like pot, and I didn't feel like a harangue on the dangers of drug abuse and that one great uncle in Shanghai who was addicted to opium. But when I tried to roll down the windows, a storm of protests stopped me.

"You're letting out all the smoke!"

"That's the point! I'm getting dizzy."

"I's for – for a _Min'_ ward."

If I crashed, there wouldn't be enough of any of our minds left to ward, but before I could point that out, Zig did something to boost everyone's confidence (except maybe Adam's) and I finished the drive with the supreme assurance.

But probably not with much logic, because I became absolutely convinced that the Monterey Bay Aquarium, my absolute favorite aquarium in the world, was the absolute best place to meet Cassandra's Handmaid's guide. I mean, where else would the guide possibly go, right? Why would anyone go to Monterey without stopping by the aquarium? By the time I parked at the end of Cannery Row (missing the parking meter by inches – or was it a foot?), Ezri and Zig had slumped against each other and were mumbling incoherently about jellyfish and coral reefs, and Sam was drunkenly lecturing me on the habitat and lifecycle of pufferfish. Fascinating stuff, that.

As I peered woozily at the meter and tried to feed it pennies, my phone rang. "How are you?" Cyndi asked anxiously. "I've been watching your car on the surveillance cameras, and you've all been sitting there for ten minutes."

Ten minutes? I shook my head and gulped some of the brisk sea breeze to clear my head. "We're fine," I assured her. "Sam and Ezri, er, Mind warded the car."

"Say no more," she replied drily. "Are you going to be okay visiting the aquarium? Also, _why_ are you visiting the aquarium?" I could practically see her raising an eyebrow at her phone.

Zig's confidence Effect held in the face of her skepticism. "Because our 'in' is here. Trust me. I know what I'm doing."

A very _loud_ silence greeted that declaration. Then, "Good luck."

And actually, we did have good luck as Ezri, who was partially sober, and I coaxed and dragged Sam and Zig out of my car and released Adam from the trunk, and the five of us staggered our way down the sidewalk. Cannery Row was lined with shops and tourist traps, and on a weekend the area was bustling. I unfolded a AAA map of Northern California and pretended to be searching for directions, which more or less explained our semi-random walk, and we garnered no more than a few odd looks as we wove our way through the crowds to the main entrance.

As soon as Ezri, Sam, and I had paid for our (and Zig's and Adam's) tickets, Zig made a zigzagging beeline upstairs to the Open Sea exhibit and his beloved jellyfish. Sam, gesticulating wildly, and Adam almost immediately lost themselves in the press of harassed-looking parents and screaming children, while Ezri struck up a conversation with a bored young woman manning the information station. Alone in the midst of so many young faces, my glance fell on the kelp forest tank. I suddenly thought of the first time Mom and Dad brought all three of us kids here. It was just before Christmas, and when the aquarium held its kelp forest feeding, the diver appeared in a Santa suit. "Look, PJ." Dad picked up PJ and set him on his shoulders for a better view over the sea of heads. "Look at Santa."

A white mother standing next to him gasped. She hastily bent down to tell her daughter, "That's the Grinch, darling. The Grinch who stole Christmas."

We used to tease Dad about it every time December rolled around, bringing with it men in Santa suits in the malls and on the street corners. Colette or I would point at one and say, "Look, the Grinch!" and Mom would roll her eyes and say, "I can't go anywhere with you. I need to wear pants over my head to hide my face." And PJ would look around at us and beg, "Can we go see the fish again? Pleeeease?" But the tickets were so expensive that we'd only gone once more as his fifth birthday gift. And then he'd disappeared, and with him all mentions of Grinches or kelp forest feedings.

When I found him, I wouldn't make him wait for his birthday. I'd take him to the aquarium right away, and we'd spend the whole day here. On an impulse, I walked into the gift shop and bought a plush octopus – a nice soft, huggable one – for him. He'd love all the tentacles.

A text from Cyndi. "Any progress?"

Right. Time to stop daydreaming about things to do with PJ and actually work on getting him back.

"Not yet," I texted back. Armed with two paper cups of hot water from the café, I stirred in some dried chrysanthemum flowers and ginseng root for mental and physical alertness, then set off in search of Sam and Zig to sober them up. They'd congregated by the moon jelly tank and were staring slack jawed at the translucent bells as the jellies pulsed, open close open close open close. There was something truly hypnotic about them, but I shoved the drinks under my friends' noses and stood well back while they sipped obediently – then coughed and sputtered and came awake.

"Ugh! That was disgusting!" Sam complained.

"Yep," I said unrepentantly. "But it worked, didn't it?"

A ping from our phones interrupted his complaints. Ezri texted all of us, "Met a girl who's plugged into the drug scene. Promising lead. She invited us to a party."

Sam typed back with his usual suspicion, "Is she Technocracy?"

It was Cyndi who answered. "No. College kid, volunteers at MBA. She's clean."

"Why do we think a college druggie is a promising lead?" was my contribution.

It was Zig who answered the group text this time, with surprisingly good grammar, "Drug dealer Frank is involved in all this. Pretty sure he's Technocracy."

A Technocratic drug dealer? Things just kept getting crazier and crazier. Did this Frank even have anything to do with Fort Ord, or were we just wasting our time? Wandering over to a dark corner of the exhibit, I called Cyndi, who pointed out that we really didn't know what we were looking for, so if we had any kind of lead, we might as well follow it.

* * *

The party, as college parties are wont to do, officially started at 9 pm, but no one sane would actually show up until 10 at the earliest. We all split up during the afternoon, but Ezri and I met up for dinner and then wandered around for a while checking on spots for mushroom planting until 9:45. Then, following the directions his new friend had given him, I drove into historic Monterey and turned onto a side street. In the end, we didn't even need to check the house numbers – all the lights were blazing, music was blaring, and loud drunken voices and tipsy laughter were spilling out of a quaint little house. Sam, Adam, and Zig met us at the foot of the porch steps, Sam casting longing glances at the red plastic cups in other partygoers' hands, and Adam sternly blocking his path towards free alcohol. As soon as Ezri and I approached, they dragged us to the edge of the lawn to conference call Cyndi.

"I talked to the wave spirits," Sam reported. "There's no Spirit ward on Fort Ord – it's more like a whirlpool sucking spirits in."

"Do they know what's happening inside?" I asked impatiently.

"No, but they said people are being transported in."

"People! Like children?"

Sam shook his head. "They can't tell the difference."

I drooped, but Zig added, "I found out that everyone here is supplied by Andy, an associate of Frank's. I think Frank is connected to all the missing people. I know he was dealing drugs to RPG's mentor, and the mentor no longer remembers RPG. Frank's shady." So said the drug dealer.

Sam agreed. "Yeah, I know Frank. I don't trust him." Tell me something new.

Cyndi's voice crackled from the phone: "He makes high-quality prescription drugs. He's always in and out of trouble, always gets off light. Could be a Technocrat."

Good enough for me. "Let's go track down Frank then."

Sam reminded me, "Don't forget to mask your Wonder," then ordered Adam, "Keep watch outside."

"No drinking," he warned.

Sam didn't even bother to dignify such a useless admonition with a reply as we walked up the steps and through the front door into the party.


	6. Chapter 6 The Party

Chapter 6: The Party

Ah, college parties! Even before I walked through the front door into the living room – or what might have been a living room if it weren't full of twenty-some-year-olds laughing and shrieking and spilling beer everywhere – I was assailed by marijuana smoke. The entire _house_ smelled the way my car had on the drive down. (So the Technocracy was perfectly fine with people abusing illegal drugs but cracked down on a few individuals who wanted to use, er, slightly modified but entirely healthy traditional Chinese medicines? It needed to get its priorities straight.)

Over the din, Zig shouted, "Ima gonna check downstairs!" I hadn't even noticed the crowd spilling down a set of stairs to a basement, but he wended his way easily through the partyers, exchanging a friendly word with one, clapping another on the back in passing, the consummate drug dealer at work.

Sam's eyes shifted nervously around the room, settling on the kegs of beer in one corner, and with visible effort he wrenched his gaze away. "I'll go with Zig," he told us a little shakily, and practically fled the siren call of alcoholism.

"Where are the EANABs?" I joked to Ezri as we scanned the party for any signs of Cassandra's Handmaid's "in."

"EANABs?" he asked absently. His eyes lit up as he caught sight of a group of rather shaggy, disreputable-looking guys huddled around a coffee table, examining a heap of mushrooms.

"It's a Stanford term," I explained. "Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages. You're supposed to provide them at every university-sanctioned party for people who don't want to drink alcohol."

Rolling his eyes, Ezri pointed over at a table of glass bottles by the beer kegs. "I see some hard cider," he offered.

"The whole point of hard cider is that it's alcoholic!"

"Oh, come on, Natasha! It _barely_ has any alcohol in it! You couldn't get drunk on it if you tried! Anyway, who's that?"

I followed his finger to see a young girl – barely older than PJ – in a poufy pink dress lying on a couch with her eyes shut. Whether she was asleep or unconscious, there was no way a child that young belonged at this party. Without a word to each other, Ezri and I pushed our way across the room to examine her. Hovering by the armrest, Ezri blew a cloud of mushroom spores over her head. They settled in her hair and twinkled like gold sparks, and for a moment, she resembled a Disney princess (or at least a little girl dressed up as one). I, on the other hand, pulled out my trusty thermos, dropped in a few pinches of herbs, and shook it vigorously before uncapping it and holding it out over her head.

But before I could dump it over her face and wake her, a tall man in a black leather jacket materialized from the crowd and caught my arm. "She's fine," he said firmly.

"How can she be fine?" I protested, reclaiming my arm but obediently tilting the thermos back upright. "She's unconscious! She's what – ten years old?"

"Thirteen," specified Ezri.

"Whatever, she shouldn't even be here!"

"Nevertheless," the man said, "I must ask you not to disturb her. It would be disastrous."

"He's right," Ezri confirmed. "All her vitals check out."

A tingling sensation ran up my spine and made me shudder, and I whirled to spot a hard-looking man in a nearby corner scanning Ezri and me with Prime. The scan complete, he nodded curtly at the first guy, who relaxed perceptibly.

"I'm Priam," he introduced himself.

I blurted out, "Seriously? And who's that guy? Hector? Paris?"

He didn't so much as crack a grin and continued as if I hadn't spoken. "That is Helenus." He nodded at the security-guard-looking man. "And this young lady is Dra."

Simultaneous pings came from Ezri's and my cellphones – and Sam's. Apparently he'd wandered back upstairs – shockingly sober still – and snuck up behind us while Helenus was scanning us. The texts on our phones all came from Cyndi and read simply, "CassanDRA."

"'Dra' as in Cassandra?" Sam asked suspiciously. "As in Cassandra's Handmaid Cassandra?"  
"No," Priam said shortly. "Just Dra."

"Hmmmmmm." Sam glared at him and pulled Ezri and me aside for a whispered conversation, casting suspicious glances at Priam and Helenus the entire time. "Have you found anything yet?" he demanded in a low, tense voice.

"Not yet," I whispered back, checking nervously to make sure that Priam couldn't overhear us. As if unconcerned by our presence, he strolled over to Helenus' corner and propped himself against the wall. "You?"

Sam shook his head. "No. Zig says Andy isn't here, and no one's using any prescription drugs, which is pretty weird." I'd just have to take his word on that one – none of the parties _I'd_ ever attended had involved _any_ illegal drugs. "There's heroin and meth in the basement, but that's it."

"Yo!" called Zig's voice, and the rest of him soon slid through the crowd to join us. "How's it goin', homies?"

"Not good," Sam told him. "We haven't found anything yet."

"Well, I was talkin' wi', wi' some conspiracy theorists downstairs. They said tha' stuff is getting taken into Fort Or' by armored truck. And then it jus' all dis-dishapears."

Perhaps mimicking one of his high school teachers, Ezri praised, "That's an excellent start!"

Although the condescension would have irritated me, Zig actually looked pleased and grinned back happily (showing very bad teeth). Maybe homeless drug dealers didn't hear that many kind words, so even a sop from a teenager was welcome?

"Why don't we split up and try to talk to as many people as we can?" Ezri continued – as if he were assigning tasks for a group project. Without bothering to wait for a response, he made a beeline for the mushroom table, eagerly pulling jars of fungi out of his backpack and laying them out for the delectation of his new friends.

As Sam and Zig good-naturedly vanished back into the crowd, I gave a mental shrug, grabbed myself a hard cider, and strolled over to Priam and Helenus. Hopping up on an end table and swinging my legs, I asked as casually as I could, "So, do you guys have parties often?"

Again the two men exchanged a swift glance before Helenus replied in a much better offhand tone than mine, "Oh, every two weeks or so. You know, we meet up, catch up on who's friendly with whom, who's fallen out with whom, the like." He nodded his head meaningfully at the crowd and lowered his voice. "Dra keeps an eye out for trouble."

Tipped off by his careful wording, I absently took a swig of hard cider then set the bottle down and pulled out a sheet of red paper and scissors. Cutting a stylized rose, I scanned the room again, specifically searching for mages. There – that young woman in the corner by the beer kegs had a Correspondence ward up. Life magic flared from a guy at the mushroom table when he touched one of Ezri's jars. And Dra was sustaining the most powerful Entropy ritual I had ever seen.

Suddenly, her eyes flew open and she sat bolt upright. "They're coming," she announced in a calm, almost drugged voice.

That was all the warning we got.

A fraction of a second later, all the lights and music cut out. In the sudden silence, tires screeched and sirens blared, and red and blue lights revolved around the walls, lending the entire scene a psychedelic air. Panicked partyers began to flee for the doors, knocking over furniture and bottles as they went, and the thudding of wood and clanking of cans formed an eerie backdrop for their shrieks.

Before we could react, glass sprayed everywhere as a monster the size of a bear crashed through the front window. The red and blue lights glinted off shiny metal armor and illumined sharp, curved claws. It was a HITMARK – one of those expensive cyborg-beasts that the Technocracy sent in the last extremity when it didn't much care if the targets (or innocent bystanders) survived the hunt. I supposed that having one sent after me and my friends was a mark of distinction, a backhanded gesture of respect from the Technocracy, but I could have done without this official recognition.

Our personal HITMARK landed on all fours in the center of the room, swept the room with vicious glowing yellow eyes – and leaped straight for Dra. Still trapped by the tail end of her ritual, she only stared blankly at the monster.

Suddenly Priam flashed to her side – sped up by Time – and lunged bodily for her, straining every muscle to yank her out of the beast's path. With one clawed paw, the HITMARK batted him aside almost casually, and such was the force of the blow that he tumbled across the floor to slam into a cabinet.

A text lit up our phones – an anguished warning from Cyndi: "They cut power to the house. Can't do anything from here. You're on your own."

I ducked behind a sofa and tried to cut the paper rose into a HITMARK so I could rip its Pattern, but the police cars' blue and red lights kept piercing my eyes and blinding me, and my hands were shaking too hard. A flash of the lights showed me Ezri stuffing a lion's mane fungus into his mouth; as he chewed frantically and gulped it down, his expression turned wrathful. Another flash of the lights revealed Sam stiffening his clothing into armor. Flash – Helenus rammed his shoulder into the backdoor and broke it open so bystanders (and all the other mages) could flee. Flash – Dra still sat motionless on the couch, regarding the HITMARK dreamily. Flash – Priam picked himself up and raced back across the room, throwing himself in front of the monster and freezing it in a staring contest with a Mind Effect.

Suddenly, all the lights in the house blazed brilliant white, like staring directly into the sun. Cyndi had succeeded into restoring power at last, and was trying to blind the creature, which whimpered and tossed its head in agony, trying to hide its eyes. Unfortunately, she stunned all of us too.

Crouched behind another sofa, Zig called urgently, "Dra's overwhelmed by the whole thing!"

As soon as I could force my eyelids back open, I cut the heart of my rose into a rough HITMARK outline and tore at the beast's pattern, hacking through its metal plating to the animal it had been based on. Pieces of armor began to crack off.

Holding up a fat mushroom, Ezri blew hard at it and sent a cloud of spores straight into the HITMARK's sensitive eyes. Squinching them shut, it howled and clawed wildly at them.

Meanwhile, Sam yanked out his revolver and strode forward, pointing the gun straight at the weakened spot on the HITMARK's side – but it was writhing too much. The bullet clipped the edge of the armor and ricocheted off to bury itself in the ceiling.

"Priam!" shouted Helenus. "Get Dra out of here!" Running forward, he also whipped out a revolver and fired point-blank at the HITMARK, catching it right in the mouth. Bellowing madly, it swiped at both Sam and Dra, mostly missing Sam but knocking Dra to the floor. Helenus gave a shout of fury and leaped to her side, throwing his body over hers to shield her. "I _told_ you to get her out!" he roared at his friend,

But that was the beast's last act of defiance. Still shaking its head wildly, it fled, barreling through the kitchen and out the backdoor with Ezri and me in pursuit.

"It's escaping!" Ezri shouted. "Faster!"

Without slowing, I crammed a handful of herbs into my mouth and stuffed another handful into Ezri's hand. "Eat these!" I yelled at him in a muffled voice.

He choked them down and shoved a mushroom at me. "Here! It'll let you talk to spirits!"

Texts lit up our phones again, Cyndi typing emphatically, "What are you doing! Do not follow! Stop stop stop!"

Did she really expect us to obey and let a HITMARK roam the streets of Monterey?

A few streets away from the house, we finally caught up to the beast. It had splintered the door of someone's shed and crammed itself into the darkest corner, still clawing desperately at its eyes and whining the way Brownie had when she was a puppy and crashed full speed into a table leg. Her whimpers and the way she'd licked and licked at her paw had nearly broken my heart. A sudden wave of sympathy for the HITMARK – just another innocent animal caught in forces beyond its control – struck me. The _bear_ hadn't asked to be purchased by the Technocracy and tortured and mangled with cybernetic implants. _It_ never asked to be transformed into a killing machine.

Instead of ripping its Pattern again, I spritzed its head with a soothing herbal mix, and it immediately calmed down, collapsing to the floor and breathing heavily like a sick dog. Then I approached it cautiously, holding out a hand with the palm up and talking to it the entire time. "Good boy, there's a good boy, let me just take a look at you…."

"Natasha! What are you doing?" demanded Ezri, but he didn't dare approach to pull me away.

"DESTROY IT," Cyndi texted furiously.

A hard, cold arm wrapped around my chest and dragged me backwards bodily. "Adam!" I protested, scraping uselessly at the golem's clay skin. "Let me go! Sam! What are you doing?"

"We have to kill it, Natasha," he snapped. "It's not a pet! What are _you_ doing?"

"But it's not its fault! The Technocracy made it this way!" I kicked and punched at Adam, but he held on implacably. "Let me go!"

"We can' keep it," Zig reminded me, strolling up. "Where would you put it?"

Sam's phone rang. "Tell Natasha it's not a pet!" Cyndi shouted, and he winced and held the phone away from his ear so we could all hear her voice. "The Technocracy will just patch it up and send it after us again! Ezri, destroy it now!"

Ezri gave me a sympathetic look. "I'll do it humanely," he promised.

Helplessly I watched as he walked up to the poor beast, let it sniff his hand, and then offered it a poisonous matsutake mushroom. The HITMARK gave a little whimper, moved its head weakly, and daintily took the mushroom between its teeth. As soon as it swallowed, it closed its eyes, gave a long sigh, and collapsed into dust that blew away in the next gust of wind.

I went limp in the golem's arms.

Zig's phone rang next. "Yo," he said cheerfully. "Uh huh, yep, yep, see you there man."

"Who was that?" Sam demanded.

"Helenus. I gave him my number."

"They got away?" Ezri asked sharply.

"Yep. They wan' to meet by the research station. Hey, Natasha, can you give us a ride?"

I glared at all of them and thumped the golem's arm. "Do I _look_ like I can drive right now?"

Now that they needed a chauffeur again, Sam ordered Adam to release me, and I smoothed out my shirt in an effort to hide my face. They'd been right to insist that we euthanize the HITMARK, of course. What would I have done with it anyway – taken it home as a pet? Kept it in the sanctum? Even apart from the inevitable fight that would cause with Mom, how would I even take care of a cyborg bear? The Technocracy didn't exactly publish care manuals for their biologically altered organisms. And yet…. The image of the HITMARK cowering at the back of the shed, clawing miserably at its eyes, would stay with me forever. Much like the children the Technocracy had kidnapped, the bear had just been a helpless, innocent creature caught in forces beyond its control. What the Technocracy had done was despicable.

Grimly, I stumbled back down the empty streets to my car, the others wisely trailing at a discreet distance. They even managed to maintain a discreet _mental_ distance while climbing into the car, shutting the doors with subdued thumps. It wasn't until we were halfway to the research station that Sam tentatively asked, "Uh, Natasha, do you mind if we stop here for a minute?"

"Why?" I snapped grouchily. "We're going to be late."

"Um, I'd like to talk to those camera spirits to see if they can keep watch…."

In answer, I swerved to the curb with a screech of my tires and let the engine idle while Sam got out and held a quick conversation with a traffic camera. Before we'd even reached the research station, a spirit had already flitted over to squeal excitedly at Sam: "I found baby kittens that way! And there's a baby seal over there!"  
Sam – about the last person in the world you'd expect to take an interest in cute baby animals – groaned and asked, "How about humans? Are there any humans?"

The spirit drooped at such a mundane request. "Yes," it pouted. "There are two tall male humans and one small female human. Over there by the bench." Then it perked up a little. "Are you _sure_ you don't want to see the baby seal first?" it wheedled.

Poor Sam opened his mouth, shut it, and finally said, "Thanks, but maybe later."

Our little band of heroes struck out towards our new allies, valiantly climbed a fence that fiercely attempted to rip our clothing, and stumbled over rough ground to a bench overlooking the ocean. As the camera spirit had reported, Priam, Helenus, and Cassandra awaited us there, the young girl playfully tossing rocks into the water.

Having appointed himself our spokesman, Sam greeted her first. "Cassandra?"

She whirled around and threw a stone at him. "Don't call me that!" she cried passionately. "I _hate_ that name!"

Beside her, Helenus didn't even bother to hide a smirk, and Priam said reprovingly, "Dra."

How fortunate we were that Sam had actually heeded Adam's command not to drink at the party. Instead of reaching for his gun, he tried diplomacy for a change. "Sorry," he apologized sincerely. "Dra."

She only pouted and picked up another rock to fling into the dark waters.

"Thank you for helping us back there," Priam said warily to all of us. "We appreciated the assistance." Something in his voice suggested that he was trying to determine our motives without coming straight out and asking. If we did this diplomatic dance, we'd be here all night.

Apparently Helenus agreed with my assessment, because he demanded bluntly, "What brings your cabal to Monterey?"

Spinning around in a whirl of skirts and hair, Dra cried, "Are you here to help us find Victor? Victor Green?"

Cyndi's text was almost instantaneous: "VRG."

"Perhaps," Sam replied cautiously. "We have reason to believe that the Technocracy has been targeting Mind mages."

Priam and Helenus looked at each other for a moment before Helenus nodded at Priam, who said, "Yes, Victor is a Mind mage. He disappeared two months ago."

"What do you know about Fort Ord?" Ezri demanded suddenly. "Someone suggested that something is going on there, and someone else called Cassandra's Handmaid said we needed to find an in."

"Cassandra's Handmaid?" asked Dra. "What a funny name!"

The two men exchanged another wary glance. "It's not clear what the Technocracy is up to in Fort Ord," Priam said at last. "We haven't been able to crack the wards, and frankly, we haven't been willing to risk it."

At his last words, Zig perked up. "Any of ya know Frank?" he slurred at them. "Drug dealer? Shady guy?"

Priam and Helenus both shook their heads and looked inquiringly at Dra, who hopped onto the bench and balanced right on its edge, flapping her arms for balance. "Nope!" she said. "Never heard of him!" Then she leaped off, giggling as she landed in the dirt.

"I've been having these dreams," Sam said, bending down so he was at eye level with her. He proceeded to give her a quick summary of the arch and initials. "We think that your friend Victor must be VRG. Is it possible that all the missing mages are inside Fort Ord?"

"Maybe," she replied. Then she spun in a circle to make her princess skirts fly out around her.

"We're going to investigate," Ezri told all three of them. "Will you help us?"

Priam and Helenus swiftly halted Dra's spinning and pulled her aside for an intense whispered conversation. Finally, Priam said to us, "Dra's powers wax and wane with the moon. We're going dark until at least March 20th, because that's when the moon is just large enough. Contact us then, and we'll talk."

After swapping phone numbers with them and getting a recommendation for a relatively secure hostel, we bade them a goodnight and headed back towards the street.

"Stop stop!" Cyndi texted urgently. "There's a black car circling nearby, watching the car!"

"Safe path?" I typed back.

Within instants she'd mapped out a detailed, tortuous path that would lead us on a winding route around the research station, down to the beach, through a dark neighborhood, and back to the car. Doubtfully, Ezri cast an Entropy Effect to check it and became absolutely convinced that it was a terrible option.

"Cyndi," I called her to object, "that's going to get us caught for sure!"

"What? No it's not!" Furious clacking came over the phone as she pulled up security footage and double checked her path. "No, go that way!"

"But Ezri says that it will lead us straight to the Technocracy!"

"And how does Ezri know that?"

"Ummm, Entropy, I think?"

"Well, tell him to stop botching his Effects when I'm trying to save all of you!"

So we followed her path, got to the car safely, and made it to the hostel at 1:00 in the morning. Needless to say, the little old lady who ran it was not overly pleased to be woken in the middle of the night, even by paying customers, and pursed her lips tightly when she saw Sam's flask.

"There will be no alcohol on the premises," she insisted. "Hostel policy."

Although Sam looked like he wanted to protest, Ezri and I both kicked him at the same time, and he instead defiantly knocked back the contents of the flask, turned it upside down over the sidewalk to prove that it was empty, and wiped the back of his mouth with his sleeve. "There," he said. "It's all gone."

Glaring at him, the old lady harrumphed and finally admitted us, but not before eying us suspiciously and insisting that we pay in full in advance for the night's stay. Between Sam, Ezri, and me, we managed to scrounge up enough cash, but Zig cheerfully waved away our offers to pay for his bed and staggered away to find a nice alleyway to sleep in.

Before collapsing onto my cot, I squatted in a corner of the hallway and checked in with Cyndi, who chatted with me distractedly while playing a Starcraft game. "I found a replay of a game with – argh! No! – someone called Kitsune. Die, zerg! Kitsune is really good. It's really weird – she and these Koreans somehow hacked the game and changed the rules to play capture-the-flag. Kitsune won by being really reckless." Frantic clicking and typing. "Also, I just got another email from Dr. Etrin urging me to take this job."

After hanging up with Cyndi, I stared at my phone for a long moment, wondering whether to call Mom and Dad, or at least Colette, and let them know I was spending the night with friends. But that would only lead to another fight because they'd be worried about me and I'd feel guilty for making them worry, and somehow worry and guilt always manifested themselves as angry words in our family. Instead of contacting them, I turned off my phone and went to bed.


End file.
